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| Titel |
Modelling as a means to promote water diplomacy in Southern Africa: the Stampriet Transboundary Aquifer System case study |
| VerfasserIn |
Giovanna De Filippis, Tales Carvalho Resende, Youssef Filali-Meknassi, Shaminder Puri, Piet Kenabatho, Maria Amakali, Kwazikwakhe Majola, Rudy Rossetto |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250153333
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-18297.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Within the framework of the “Governance of Groundwater Resources in Transboundary
Aquifers” (GGRETA) project, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (SDC), the Governments of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, jointly
with the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme (UNESCO-IHP) are
undertaking an assessment of the Stampriet Transboundary Aquifer System (STAS).
The importance of the STAS to the region draws from the fact that it is the only
permanent and dependable water resource in the area, which covers 87000 km2
from Central Namibia into Western Botswana and South Africa’s Northern Cape
Province.
The first phase of the project (2013-2015) focused on an assessment of the STAS
which allowed establishing a shared science based understanding of the resource.
The activities of the second phase of the project (2016-2018) will consolidate the
technical results achieved and the tools developed in the first phase, and will strengthen
capacity on groundwater governance at the national and transboundary levels to
support the process of establishment of a multi-country cooperation mechanism
(MCCM). The establishment of the STAS MCCM would be the first example of a
mechanism for the management and governance of a transboundary aquifer in Southern
Africa.
The joint development of a numerical model is crucial to foster such cooperation as it
provides a baseline for the formulation of sound policies for the governance of the STAS. The
model is being developed through the application of the FREEWAT platform (within the
H2020 FREEWAT project - FREE and open source software tools for WATer resource
management; Rossetto et al., 2015), an open source and public domain GIS-integrated
modelling environment for the simulation of the hydrological cycle. The FREEWAT project
aims at improving water resource management by simplifying the application of
water-related regulations through the use of modeling environments and GIS tools for
storage, management and visualization of large spatial datasets; this is demonstrated by
running fourteen case studies using the FREEWAT platform. Among these, the STAS is a
particularly representative case study aiming at facilitating the link between science based
analysis and stakeholder participation aiming at the adoption of sound transboundary
management policies.
Due to the scarcity of surface water, water-demanding activities in the study area
rely only on groundwater. The first version of the model is developed adapting an
existing model of the Namibian part of the aquifer: so far, the groundwater body is
discretized using rectangular cells about 40 km2 wide and a stack of three aquifers
divided respectively by three aquitards with variable thicknesses and heterogeneous
hydraulic properties. The model setup is then revised integrating outcomes from the
GGRETA project and extended until the groundwater body limits. Also, boundary
conditions and hydrologic stresses (i.e., rainfall infiltration and abstraction for irrigation
purposes) were re-defined according to maps and datasets available from the GGRETA
project.
The involvement of the UNESCO-IHP within the FREEWAT Consortium supports the
coordination and integration of previous research outcomes (e.g., from the GGRETA project)
and the model development to achieve a full characterization of the STAS current and
forecast dynamics and possibly highlighting any existing knowledge gaps. This will be |
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