Friday, 16 October 2015

A brief review of ‘Cooperation on Africa’s Transboundary aquifers- conceptual ideas’


Over the next couple of months, this blog will discuss the complex issues relating to transboundary water in Africa as well as explore possible solutions and management approaches. Africa’s population is rapidly expanding, thus the continents reliance on water, especially ground-water is great. Groundwater is of growing importance in Africa, as it can play a role in reducing poverty, and alleviating the stresses of rapid population growth and the threat of climate change (Scheumann and Alker 2009).

This first post will briefly summarise and assess the article ‘Cooperation on Africa’s Transboundary aquifers- conceptual ideas’ (Scheumann and Alker 2009). Ultimately the article argues that cooperation and management between riparian nations is essential if the management and sustainability of transboundary water from aquifer systems is to be a success. According to Scheumann and Alker, understanding of transboundary aquifer systems is far less advanced than the understanding of other transboundary water bodies such as rivers and lakes.  Despite acknowledging that countries should be making use of existing transboundary water organisations, more should have been discussed regarding the advantages of using already well established political and communication networks between water sharing countries.

Furthermore the article focussed very heavily on the hydrogeological issues surrounding transboundary water sharing including issues of defining boundaries of groundwater resources. The importance of any political or economic difficulties in sharing a transboundary aquifer system was
overlooked. 

Overall, I did mainly agree with the article, especially that each transboundary aquifer system should be studied independently in order to assess the impacts and possible management strategies and that aquifer systems should not be placed into the 6 model types categorised by (Eckstein and Eckstein 2005). This is because each aquifer system is located in its own setting with its own unique circumstance and is influenced by different hydrogeological and anthropogenic factors.







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