1 Introduction
African watersheds are, and should be, focal points for our understanding of the ecological and political stages of Africa’s longue durée and its long-term future. Sub-Saharan Africa is now in the midst of two massive sets of changes in its hydrological systems. The first consists of the building of a new wave of high modernist hydroelectric/irrigation dam projects on its main river systems (the Congo, the Niger, the Zambezi, the Blue Nile, the Wele, the Volta, and the White Nile). The second are the expected regional and global changes in climate that will have a quite distinctive set of effects on different African hydrologies.
There are any number of settings in which the future dynamics of hydrology schemes and climate change will play out in Africa and across the globe. For the Zambezi watershed alone, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) anticipates a 10 to 15 per cent decline in rainfall in its catchment area.1 The annual distribution (seasonality) of that decline will be the decisive factor in determining its human impact. Eastern zones in the rainfall shadow of the Ethiopian highlands’ escarpment will likely be hydrological losers. Ethiopia’s Blue Nile watershed may well record higher total rainfall than other areas, but it will nevertheless experience an overall decline from its historical patterns. How should historians approach these changes in the near-term future and the historical record?
A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains off of it goes into the same place. John Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is: ‘that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community.’2
Africa’s distinctive annual wet−dry seasonal oscillation suggests that the effects of overall aridity on the shape of seasonal water patterns will likely be even greater than in other parts of the world, even as water storage interventions (dams) attempt to regulate and control seasonal flows—with all of the inevitable engineering snafus and miscalculations that this entails.
African farmers, fisherfolk, and residents of mushrooming urban ecologies have evolved historically along with their longer-range seasonalities and metabolisms. Moreover, the transformation of Africa’s historical patterns of epidemic waterborne tropical and sub-tropical diseases (dysentery, malaria, onchocerciasis, bilharzia, cholera) are fairly certain effects, although these are not part of engineers’ plans.3 Other infectious diseases of human-natural ecological contact—like influenza and Ebola—derive from genetic mutations as viruses leap from one species to another. More complex engineering plans, like disease interactions, teach us about ecological complexity.
Can the past foretell the longer-range future? In the context of climate change and high modernism, future hydrologies are a moving, dodging target. Watersheds are hydrological features of moving water, but they are also markers of cultural and economic identity (like bayous, coastlines), and sites of political conflicts over resources.
As they currently stand, planning studies for Africa’s new generation of watershed management infrastructure (aka hydroelectric dams) make neither a meaningful assessment of an inherent historical context, nor do they fully incorporate the likely futures of Africa’s hydrological systems in terms of climate change. Climate science, as often as not, falls prey to political agendas, geographies, and engineering oversights. The ‘run-of-the-river’ (ror) systems and reservoirs built into the design of Africa’s dams have global analogues. These would include watersheds like the Mekong, Colorado, Rhône, Tigris/Euphrates, and Yangtse, although Africa’s seasonal climate patterns mark the continent’s rivers as distinctive in their past and in their future.
This chapter examines the relative effects of climate change and historical trends in water management on water resources in Africa by exploring two cases: the Blue Nile and Zambezi watersheds. The discussion begins with an argument for making watersheds a primary focus for understanding historical changes in African political ecologies. In the longue durée, Africa’s variations of global climate change will take place alongside a new generation of water management schemes—dam building—and changes in the anthroposphere (the domain of human ecology) that will shape the effects of climate change.
2 Climate as Africa’s Historical Stage
Let us begin with the deeper background for Africa and its water. Beyond the fundamental topographic shapes offered by its geology, African landscapes reflect the continent’s changing patterns of climate—a circulation of wind, moisture, and temperature—that mark Africa as distinct from other global land masses. Unlike in temperate zones—Europe, North America, and Central Asia—in which growing seasons and cycles of life respond directly to fluctuations in temperature, Africa’s rhythms of life primarily reflect the distribution of moisture in the form of rainfall affecting, in different ways, river deltas and floodplains. Africa’s annual patterns of rainy and dry seasons, the length of each year’s growing (or fishing) season, as well as humidity and soil moisture levels all take their cue from the annual rhythms of cyclonic winds, ocean temperatures, and the earth’s rotation and movement around the sun. Being bisected by the equator, the tilting of half of Africa’s land mass towards the sun in summer and away from the sun in winter prompts the anticyclonic and trade winds that set the yearly cycle between rainy and dry seasons.
In fact, Africa’s position on the globe means that the continent’s land mass and human landscapes experience the clearest separation between wet and dry seasons of any region on earth. The shifting cloudy mass of rain-bearing turbulence that gathers around the equator—known as the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (itcz)—establishes a two-part pattern of seasons which in turn sets the pattern of rainfall found across almost the entire continent—summer wet and winter dry. The basic summer wet/winter dry pattern for Africa also exhibits also subtle variations from year to year and within particular geographical settings, which can result in short or delayed rainy seasons with notable effects on the landscape. Several years of short or delayed rains along the itcz’s edges result in drought, historically a common occurrence in many parts of Africa away from the equator, such as the Sahel region at the southern edge of the Sahara or equivalent grassland areas in Southern Africa. In a new world of human-induced climate change, Africa’s wet and dry seasons will continue to be sharply divided, albeit perhaps with even greater year-to-year swings.4
In more recent times, scholars of African climate history have used sources such as lake levels, geological stratigraphy, and the still limited archaeology of human settlement to identify climate patterns in the 800−1600 ad period, during which the Sahelian states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay flourished and then declined. Historian George Brooks and historical meteorologist Sharon Nicholson offer somewhat contrasting conclusions about the nature of these climate periods and their effects on political change. Nicholson uses sources such as lake level stratigraphy and scarce local records from lake bed soil sediments to reconstruct climate epochs. Brooks attempts a similar task of relating climate to changes in political hegemony and patterns of trade.5
As it transpired, the years 800−1300 were relatively wet, before being followed by a drier interlude that lasted until 1450. Thereafter came another wetter period, which included the so-called Little Ice Age (1500−1850), during which observers reported that the peaks of both Mt. Kilimanjaro and Ras Dashan in Ethiopia were snow-capped.6 In the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century, Kilimanjaro’s ice cap receded while Ras Dashan’s disappeared completely. Conclusions about the interplay between climate and politics are, of course, subject to debate as further data emerges from archaeological studies of sediment and pollen variations that may have affected human activities. However, at the very least, it appears that the overall dynamics of climate over time seem to be the context for human history in a way that frames Africa’s distant past as well as in what climate science anticipates to be the coming age of climate change.
This chapter places Africa’s distinctive regional patterns of wet–dry rainfall oscillation in the context of human-induced watershed metabolism. New historical scholarship that explores the confluence of nation-building with ambitious, high modernist visions for the control of nature will frame economic policy as well as our understanding of current political debate that revolves around watershed management. The chapter will thus place the new era of dam construction in Africa within the deeper context of climate change that may lie ahead.
3 A New High Modernism: Africa and the New Global Dam Era
James Scott, high priest of the critique of high modernism, describes several of its characteristics:
- 1)a strong confidence in the potential for scientific and technological progress, including a reliance on the expertise of scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and other intellectuals;
- 2)attempts to meet human needs by mastering nature, also including attempts to control and change human nature;
- 3)an emphasis on rendering complex environments (such as old cities) or concepts (such as various social dynamics) legible, most often through spatial ordering (e.g. city planning on a grid);
- 4)a disregard for historical, geographical, and social context in development.7
Africa is at the cutting edge of global water management’s new era of dam building. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has just initiated the building of a 4,800-megawatt (MW) dam called Inga iii that will generate more power than Egypt’s Aswan High Dam. For some, this represents an environmentally friendly venture, perhaps because it is a run-of-the-river dam that will not require a large reservoir but will rely instead on sustained river flow.8 Smaller hydroelectric dams—such as the newly opened 250 MW dam on the White Nile at Bujagali in Uganda, Ethiopia’s 300 MW dam on the Takazze River, a tributary of the Nile, and a 185 metre-high structure (Africa’s highest) in northern Ethiopia to capture river water that flows through a deep canyon before its westward descent into the greater Nile system, are all examples of this type. In Equatorial Guinea, the 120 MW Djibloho Dam, which was completed in 2012, provides ninety per cent of this small country’s power needs.9
Yet, these projects are miniscule compared to the gigantic world-leading schemes planned for elsewhere in Africa in the next decade. Ethiopia is now in the latter stages of diverting water from the Blue Nile into a reservoir near the Sudan that will allegedly make the monster 6,000 MW Grand Renaissance (Hedasse) Dam Africa’s largest and the world’s seventh largest—at least for now. The World Bank’s support for an Ethiopia-Kenya high-tension power link to carry hydropower to distant cities is planned for a 2019 opening. At a capacity of 1,800 MW, the Gilgil Gibe iii project on the Gibe-Omo basin will provide irrigation to Ethiopia’s southwestern margins and hydroelectric power to the growing towns of East Africa, but it will also likely halve the size of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya and drastically diminish the lake’s fish protein stocks and aquatic biodiversity.
In energy-thirsty Southern Africa, there are already two major dams that capture the lifeblood of the mighty Zambezi River. These include the Kariba Dam, which was opened in 1960, and its mammoth lake reservoir as well as the Portuguese-built Cahora Bassa Dam, completed in 1975, that inundated Mozambique’s rural landscapes in the flooded Tsonga homelands, but fed Southern Africa’s regional power grids. A smaller 1,600 MW dam downstream from Victoria Falls on the Batoka Gorge on the Zambezi and the planned Mphanda Nkuwa Dam in Mozambique (a river-run scheme) will require a new formulation of the upstream river flow calendar.
4 Climate Change and the Transnational Setting: Impacts and Drivers
Africa is in the midst of a period of rapid change in the global movement of people and commodities when compared to the pace of historical patterns. Africa’s climate has changed in the past, such as during the Little Ice Age, but its seasonal wet–dry patterns have continued to mark the continent’s climate as distinctive (see above). Given the severe climate events envisioned to occur across the world in the latest ipcc report (drought, floods, shifts in seasonality, among others) as well as future anthropogenic interventions in African hydrology (dams, diversions, reservoir storage, urban growth), we can anticipate that there will be winners and losers within the population. The following sub-sections discuss some key issues to watch in this regard. What will be the markers of these futures and pasts?
4.1 Crop Changes and New Crop ‘Value Chains’
Global capital flows and markets in Asia and Europe have already encouraged investment in land leasing (‘land grabs’) for production of food crops and oil seeds, including chickpeas, lentils, sesame, and maize, which will all require chemical fertiliser and a reliable supply of water. These crops will need infrastructure so that they can be delivered to domestic urban and international markets. Maize, for example, will be key for export demand for livestock/poultry consumption habits of the expanding urban middle classes.10
4.2 Urban Footprints (Metabolism)
Africa is the most rapidly urbanising part of the globe. Demand from these new urban populations are creating ‘urbansheds’, where demand for new infrastructure for the supply of water and energy will outstrip current capacity and transform watersheds’ physical landscapes for the purposes of water storage, delivery, and seasonal distribution.
4.3 Hydroelectric Transmission Infrastructure
Plans for hydroelectric power production in key watersheds will be regional (Ethiopia/Sudan/Kenya/Uganda) and therefore also transnational (Angola, Zambia, Mozambique/South Africa). As water capture networks become concentrated in dams and as part of irrigation schemes, competition over the legal and de facto control of watersheds will increase tensions over access to scarce resources between nations, cities, social classes, and international actors seeking to extract value from crops, labour, distribution, and/or services.
4.4 Headwater and Delta Ecologies
Climate change and new hydrologies, in particular watersheds, will raise tensions over the shifting seasonality of water flows and storage, the transformation of former floodplains into reservoirs, and the ecology of river deltas. In most global cases for watersheds, headlands versus delta ecologies have fallen under different political authority, influencing and promoting colonial rule, conflicts as industrial agriculture and urban growth have strained political relations. Each of these conflicts has had its foundations in local hydrological and human ecologies as well as in regional politics.
4.5 Watershed Health
Research on the correlation between waterborne diseases, irrigation dams, and their reservoirs is not new, but systematic study thereof has been sparse.11 Moreover, what has been even less visible is the effect of hydroelectric dam ecologies on health concerning diseases like schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis (river blindness), and malaria. Vectors and hosts for these infectious diseases differ, but all depend for their transmission on watery settings, vector life cycles, and human−disease vector contacts.12 Disease ecologies, including those for chronic and epidemic infectious diseases, are therefore important aspects of climate change, the new waterscape transformations that lie ahead as part of development planning, and the ways in which climate change affects particular plans for water storage. Again, winners and losers will emerge in Africa’s changing climatic and hydrological patterns.
5 North and South of the Equator: Watersheds of the Blue Nile and the Zambezi
In general, African watersheds are poorly studied compared to those in other parts of the world. Their hydrological and social histories often relate directly to their colonial pasts. These colonial footprints have now taken a newer transnational form in the regional schemes for access to irrigation and hydroelectric grids that will serve areas like the Nile Valley, the Zambezi, the Congo, the Lesotho highlands, the Niger, and the Volta. Each has a different hydrological profile and history of management in the past century and will be subject to distinctive potential effects of climate change in the coming era. The following subsections discuss two examples.
5.1 The Blue Nile
The Blue Nile provides the greater portion (60 per cent) of the Nile waters that descend the long slope past its confluence with the White Nile at Khartoum and downstream towards Egypt. Moreover, the Ethiopian highlands in general provide over 83 per cent of the total Nile waters that reach the Aswan Dam. There is a remarkable difference between the body of data available on the Nile’s outflow in Sudan and Egypt and what we know about the Blue Nile, where the flows appear only sporadically in the historical record.13 Under its 20th-century imperial governments, Ethiopia’s long-time policy was to use the ‘potential’ for controlling the flow of the Blue Nile as a political cat’s paw (rather than as a hydrological one) in negotiations with the colonial powers in London, Paris, and Rome.14 The first dam on Ethiopia’s Nile was not built until 1960, and even then this was only a small (11.5 MW) dam at the Blue Nile Falls (Tissisat) that was intended to provide hydroelectric support for a new industry planned at Bahir Dar, the river’s egress from the lake.
The Program Tana Beles Integrated Water Resources Development is part of a cluster of programmes aimed at decreasing poverty through sustainable land use practices in the Tana Beles Growth Corridor in Ethiopia. The Programme is linked to the Nile Basin Initiative, and financed through a loan from the World Bank.17
The project statement of goals means as much for what it does not say as for what it offers as a description of its intent. Construction ended in 2012 with the opening of the 460 MW power plant. The secondary goal here is agricultural development, which is expected to attract migrant labour (into an endemic malarial zone). The overall aim, however, was fundamentally a human-induced redirection of part of the watershed. This plan consisted in draining water from Lake Tana along its southwestern edge, channelling this water from the hydroelectric plant across the watershed and draining it into the Beles River, which flows back westwards into the Nile basin. Is a run-of-the-river design vulnerable to the vagaries of climate change? That remains a question mark.
This Tana Beles part of Blue Nile development is a new initiative that draws on a recent agreement between the upstream Nile countries (Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia) and is opposed by the downstream countries (Sudan and Egypt). Important questions remain to be answered: How will this diversion of water from the shallow Lake Tana affect the lakeside ecology since the agricultural plans would introduce new additions of nitrogen into the Beles River and draw down lake levels? Which other water resource projects are in store for the Ethiopian highlands? Do we have adequate data on changing patterns of land use in this region? An ifad survey cited in zur Heide offers an undated snapshot of a system in the process of change;18 however, it excludes assessments of a damaging lake flood in 2006 and of changes in cropping as the ‘urbanshed’ and burgeoning city of Bahir Dar rapidly increases its consumption of market-garden crops from lake wetland mini-deltas and fish from the lake. This land cover survey from 2007 is now substantially outdated as the new decade has unfolded under momentum from international capital and local responses, both demographic and ecological. Historical elements of change that occurred over the course of the 20th century would include, inter alia, the growth of new urban market centres, the introduction of new crops (maize, market garden crops), and road construction.
5.2 The Zambezi
Its history of colonial-era water management schemes as well as forecasts of rainfall decline make the Zambezi watershed a valuable model for understanding the history and future of African hydroecologies. Two water management schemes on the Zambezi—the Kariba Dam (and Lake Kariba) and Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa Dam (and Cahora Bassa reservoir)—are both markers of the high modernism of the late colonial period. The 2007 ipcc report forecast a decline in rainfall of 10 to 15 per cent (see above). What implications will this have for existing watersheds and the ones to come?
Overall, planners anticipate that in the coming decade a total of 13,000 MW of dam projects will be completed along the course of the Zambezi, from northeast Angola, through Zambia, Zimbabwe, and to its delta in Mozambique. None of the studies on the Zambezi watershed have analysed the risks presented by a changing climate and its effects on river flow.19 Ironically, the Zambezi River has drawn significant scholarship on the meaning and impact of dams along its course. In addition to technical engineering reports on flow rates and storage capacity, there are historical assessments.20 These follow a long tradition of social impact studies from the Rhodes Livingstone Institute by Thayer Scudder and Elizabeth Colson.21 In particular, the recent Isaacman study details the “challenge of sources,” namely the lopsided nature of data on the social and local economic implications of Zambezi water management compared to older feasibility studies.22 These are warning signs on the horizon.
Record flooding of the river delta in Mozambique in 2000 and again in 2014 offer a dystopian view of what may come. Recent reports from Zimbabwe and Zambia of cracks in the wall of the Kariba Dam that threaten downstream dams point to the potential knock-on threats to the power grid and to human livelihoods along the course of the river and in the watershed’s hinterlands. Dams face recurrent costs for repair and redesign arising from new conditions of climate change and upstream engineering.
A chart of the seasonal flows of the Zambezi before and after the construction of the Cahora Bassa Dam and Kariba Dam suggests an impending radical shift in the watershed in terms of the river’s seasonality of flow with the construction of those water management structures. These engineering designs for reservoirs (or run-of-the-river) as well as climate surprises and crises raise questions about the deeper effects on local economies of the arrival of kilowatt hours and flooding.23 Both the climate change warning and the recent downstream flood emergencies may be the proverbial canaries in the coalmine for the Zambezi watershed.
6 The mimes Model: Livelihoods and African Watersheds, Past and Future
Is there a model of watershed ecologies that would help us to systematise watershed changes over time that relate to climate change and more localised human-induced dynamics? One model we might propose for data-rich ecologies that may help us to compare future African watershed dynamics of political ecology is the mimes (Multi-Scale Integrated Model of Ecosystem Services) approach, which is already used to understand water/landscape interactions in the relatively data-rich Gulf of Maine fisheries and the potential effects of wind farming in New England as used by the chans project of Boston University’s Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.24
mimes is a form of ecosystem ‘accounting’ that organises data sets to form a multi-layered portrait of Coupled Human and Natural Systems (chans), their geographic setting, policy changes over time, and inexorable movements of hydrology. By placing this data into a common geographic information system (gis) framework and using overlapping mapping, it may be possible to show how the elements of an ecosystem (such as an extended watershed) intersect, including physical regimes, biological habitats, and human activities. We might otherwise call these overlapping phenomena historical conjunctures where demography, economy, nature, and culture result in a new landscape (or waterscape) that drives human livelihood choices, biodiversity, and regional politics. This method thus shows dynamic intersections between natural and human systems.
Understanding these dynamics is critical regarding the formation of policy or making sense of unintended consequences of development interventions, like a dam, or climate change. According to a recent method for analysing chans in the Gulf of Maine, a team of scholars from Boston University and Conservation International has argued that “exploring long-time horizons is essential for understanding sustainability since system states can shift into phases that are not easily moved back to a more desirable state.”25 In other words, by assembling data from overlapping human livelihoods and the physical world of a watershed it may be possible to anticipate and respond to knock-on effects of watershed management such as dams, hydroelectric schemes, monocropping on watershed soils, and agricultural landscape change. Climate change also needs to be a part of this planning, though it is rarely so.
The Gulf of Maine case may provide us with an example that may lead us forward in African cases we are considering as engineers and economists implement their plans. In the Gulf of Maine example, data collectors assembled information on the physical setting (a water column in the Gulf of Maine) from which human actors derive a livelihood. These included fisherfolk dependent on various fish species, boat owners, lobstermen, tour guides, and operators of wind turbines. The model uses past data to trace their income offtake over time. Might this model also apply to watershed/hydraulic landscapes?
With this data-rich model in mind, we can imagine a way of measuring and forecasting the effects of a watershed intervention on the various stakeholders involved in specific types of agriculture, on infrastructure construction, fish protein, human diets, livestock rearing, and, perhaps, on disease outcomes—all by season or in particular types of climate changes, including drought, flood, temperature rise effects on disease vectors, or crop choices. It may also be possible to project outcomes from particular interventions like types of dams, calendars of downstream water release, or hydroelectric strategies. Such analyses could be retrospective in the historical reconstructing of effects of dams, crop change, urbanisation, or new markets. Such an approach will require a major investment by environmental historians to assemble time series and unpublished field reports in colonial archives as well as early UN agency surveys. In many cases, retrospective modelling may be the only alternative.
The challenge at hand for historians is to explore past conditions of human settlement and climate settings and to adapt a historical model for understanding past events such as dam construction or irrigation. This approach could include plotting historical patterns on income streams from a range of livelihoods particular to a watershed and the downstream effects on social institutions, livelihoods, gendered income balance, diet, or other measures of development.
7 Future African Watersheds: an Era of Climate Change and Water Management
The mimes model of profits/income from levels of the Gulf of Maine water column shows the relationship between incomes (profits) from various activities in a marine ecology. Could such a model also serve as a didactic tool for understanding African watershed stakeholders at the local and regional scale? Here we see economic activities along a marine water column. We might plot the economic activities around a dam or reservoir or a run-of-the-river system that supports fisheries, floodplain agriculture, pastoralism, and trade. What would be the effect of various engineering strategies on local or regional economies or social systems? In the Gulf of Maine, the key intervention was the placement of wind turbines and the restrictions that this placed on various income streams and economic activities. A dam reservoir or run-of-the-river scheme might be analogous.
For any particular watershed or dam ecology, the activities to be measured would differ, but the mimes model offers a focus for data collection and valuating local livelihoods. Significant areas for assessment might include the following:
- (1)relative effect on income streams for local livelihoods or state agencies;
- (2)health (e.g. malaria, schistosomiasis, waterborne diseases, or chronic diseases);
- (3)nitrogen flows from upland agriculture into reservoirs, seasonal streams, and rivers;
- (4)protein (fish/livestock) versus carbohydrate-based (grain/legumes) incomes/diets;
- (5)crop changes in irrigated versus rain-fed areas of the watershed;
- (6)rates of geological change, erosion, or silting.
The central task here is to understand the interaction, over time, between climate change and anthropogenic changes in water flows, storage, and offtake by sector. The underlying question is whether watersheds as a unit for measuring complexity can serve as a basic tool for policy analysis and/or planning in ways that enhance human development. As the analysis of watershed complexities moves forward it must also include the longue durée of these ecologies.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” last modified June 6, 2017, accessed July 11, 2017.
United States Environment Protection Agency, “Water Topics,” last modified April 12, 2017, accessed August 10, 2014.
Pearce, Fred, “Will Huge New Hydro Projects Bring Power to African People?” Yale Environment 360, May 30, 2013, accessed July 11, 2017.
McCann, James, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth/Oxford: Heinemann/James Currey, 1999), 1−22.
Brooks, George, “A Provisional Historical Schema for Western Africa Based on Seven Climatic Periods,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 26.101 (1986): 43−62; Nicholson, Sharon E., “The Methodology of Historical Climate Reconstruction and its Application to Africa,” Journal of African History 20.1 (1979): 31−49.
Cf. Nicholson, Sharon, “A Climatic Chronology for Africa,” 75−81, 251−54, cited in James Webb, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600−1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 4−5.
Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4−5.
The Congo River, near the equator, has a lower seasonal change in water flow than other African rivers.
Information on ongoing dam projects in Africa can be obtained from the webpage of the organisation International Rivers, which is critical of dam construction; accessed August 2, 2017.
Nalepa, Rachel, “The Global Land Rush: Implications for Food Fuel, and the Future of Development,” Pardee Papers 13 (2011): 1–36.
See e.g. Scudder, Thayer, The Ecology of the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 239−41). Scudder makes precisely this point about limited research, but lists a number of infectious and vector-borne diseases as endemic to the Zambezi River valley; Kaufman, Frederick, “The Man Who Stole the Nile: An Ethiopian Billionaire’s Outrageous Land Grab,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2014, 36−42.
Schistosomiasis, whose host is a snail, has become an indicator disease for other water impounding diseases. See Gergel, Diana, “Water Resources Development: Engineering the Future of Global Health,” Issues in Brief 27 (2013): 2−3, The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
Sutcliffe, John. V., and Parks Y. P., The Hydrology of the Nile (Wallingford, Oxfordshire: International Association of Hydrological Sciences (iahs), 1999), 130−134.
McCann, James, “Ethiopia, Britain, and Negotiations for the Lake Tana Dam Project, 1922−1935,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 14.4 (1981): 667−899.
Sutcliffe, and Parks, The Hydrology of the Nile, 135.
Cf. Tved, Terje, “Hydrology and Empire: The Nile, Water Imperialism and the Partition of Africa,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39.2 (2011): 173–194.
niras, “Ethiopia Tana Beles Integrated Water Resource Development Programme,” accessed August 10, 2014.
Zur Heide, Friedrich, Feasibility Study.
Pearce, “Hydro Projects,” 4. Pearce quotes University of Wisconsin-Madison hydrologist Richard Beilfuss.
Tischler, Julia, Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation (Cambridge: Palgrave McMillian, 2013); Isaacman, Allan F., and Isaacman, Barbara S., Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965−2007 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).
Scudder, Thayer, The Ecology of the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962); Colson, Elizabeth, The Social Consequences of Resettlement: The Impact of the Kariba Resettlement upon the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971).
Isaacman, and Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, 19.
Quoted in Isaacman, and Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, 41.
Partners in this project include Conservation International and the MacArthur Foundation.
Altman, Irit et al., “An Ecosystem Framework for Marine Ecosystem-Based Management,” in The Sea: Marine Ecosystem-Based Management, vol. 16, ed. Michael Fogarty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 245−276, accessed July 14, 2017.