Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/P017002/1
Water Stewardship Portal
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor JJ Harou, The University of Manchester, Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Eng
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr T Foster, The University of Manchester, Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Eng
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr A Harris, The University of Manchester, Environment, Education and Development
- Grant held at:
- The University of Manchester, Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Eng
- Science Area:
- Freshwater
- Overall Classification:
- Unknown
- ENRIs:
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Data analysis
- Databases
- GIS
- Hydrology
- Remote sensing
- Environmental Informatics
- Abstract:
- Context Climate and demographic changes in Africa and Asia will threaten the livelihood and billions of people who depend on environmental resources, and the environment itself and its services will be increasingly threatened. Some of the most significant threats are the impacts of changes in floods and droughts and the impacts of human water system interventions (increased abstractions, storage dams, pollution, etc.). Many of the changes are unavoidable, water is required for generating food and energy and climate changes are going to occur. Water managers need to efficiently and effectively adapt water-ecological-environmental systems to preserve ecological health whilst ensuring a sustainable livelihood for those who depend on the environment. How can this be done at global scale? How can water managers reconcile and integrate remote sensing information, climate and hydrological model predictions, water rights/license and water use information to understand the viability of future ecological and economic water services and evaluate the impacts of future interventions? Proposed contribution Our proposed consortium and partners have seen evidence in our work that effective and sustainable water management is enabled when 3 conditions are met: data on hydrological reality and sectoral water use is available, analysis of the impacts of water system interventions is feasible and sufficiently accurate, and stakeholders have a credible involvement in water management decisions (with appropriate and accessible information and tools). The aim of our project is to help enable these conditions to manifest globally in a cost-effective manner by providing a generic adaptable on/offline tool that can be quickly configured, sustainably maintained, and extended over time for any basin by consortia of different user types (basin organisations, NGOs, producers, etc.). To this end we propose a water data visualisation, analysis and communication portal guided by a consortium of water stewardship interested organisations. The online/offline software platform we've called the Water Stewardship Portal (WS Portal) would combine the 3 essential components of practical water management into 4 main modules (think 'tabs' on a web browser): 1. Storage and visualisation of spatial hydrological data (GIS, remote sensing, time-series) 2. Water accounting registry 3. Intervention impact assessment 4. Decision dashboard Case-study The portal will be applied to Kenya's Tana River Basin, which covers 22% of the country's land mass and hosts 18% of Kenya's population. The basin supports a wide variety of ecosystem and economic services including hydropower production, water supply interests, reservoirs for irrigation, and a variety of ecosystems. The Tana basin supports roughly 90% of Nairobi's water supplies and generates 60% of Kenya's power. The basin is home to intensive agricultural production by Kenyan small and large farmers and multinationals; in some parts of the basin, over 80% of inhabitants rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Any change or increase in water use by any of these sectors could be controversial and lead to conflict; consumptive uses will reduce flows which have already been strongly reduced by regulating hydropower dams. For these reason the tool, with its aim to link together: accurate estimation of water use by the sectors (particularly agriculture), incorporate that into a hydrological model which is linked to a water rights database and a generic resource intervention impact model, will be valuable. The tool is to be applied in collaboration with the Water Resource Management Authority (WRMA) of Kenya, colleagues from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology, and international partners interested in water stewardship, including M&S, WWF, and The World Bank.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/P017002/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Innovation
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Innovation Projects
This grant award has a total value of £161,687
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Investigators | DA - Estate Costs | DI - Staff | DA - Other Directly Allocated | DI - T&S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £26,722 | £23,277 | £23,666 | £9,484 | £62,294 | £4,017 | £12,228 |
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