Some Features of the Nile River Basin Decision Support Tool

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Some Features of the Nile River Basin Decision
Support Tool
BALWOIS 2006, Conference on Water Observation and
Information System for Decision Support Ohrid,
23-26 May, 2006

• Mihailo Andjelic
• Republic Hydrometeorological Institute of Serbia
  (formerly Senior Technical Officer of the Food
  and Agriculture Organisation of U.N, Rome, Italy)

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FAO Nile Basin Water Resources Projects
Funded by Italy
Second phase, ended December 2003
Third phase, still ongoing
Ten participating countries Burundi, DRC, Egypt,
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan,
Tanzania, and Uganda
Focused on Capacity Building for Integrated
Shared Vision Water Resources Management
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Climate ranging from tropical rainforest to arid
zones
Average annual flow 84 bcm
85 originating from the Blue Nile, within the
months of June to September
Extensive losses through evaporation in the Sudd,
Lake Nasser, and other lakes and wetlands
Main water uses irrigation, hydro- power,
transport, industrial development, environmental
protection, etc
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General Data Some Comparisons...
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Some More General Data

• Shared by 10 African countries
• Ranges from 4 deg south 31 deg north
• Runoff generated from 20 percent of the basin
  only
• Major runoff contributing areas in
• the Ethiopian Highlands- Blue Nile
• Equatorial Lake Plateau - White Nile

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Importance for NB countries

• Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan and Egypt almost
  completely dependent on Nile - no other
  significant sources of water
• In Burundi, Rwanda and Ethiopia 100 percent of
  water generated inside countries borders (
  zero dependence)
• In Uganda 60, Sudan 23 and in Egypt only 3
  percent of runoff generated inside countries
  borders

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Water Consumption

• Present 82 km3/year
• Year 2020 estimate 144km3/year
• Average runoff 84km3/year
• Corollary
• many Nilotic countries are already rather closed
  to water stress
• future water demands are physically untenable
  without water use agreements and integrated water
  management - in fact, this is an inevitable
  necessity

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Prerequisites for integrated water management

• An institutional cooperative framework
• Adequate monitoring system
• A geo-referenced database and information system
  which includes relevant hydrometeorological,
  water demand and other data and information
• Shared-vision planning and water resources
  modelling and management support tools
• Technical expertise

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(No Transcript)
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Guiding Principles in Developing Nile-DST

• Based on latest science technology able to
  handle the Nile basin size, complexity and
  multitude of water development options
• Neutral technical decision support tool, whose
  overreaching purpose is to asses in unbiased
  manner the benefits and trade-offs of different
  water allocation/development strategies
• Developed with involvement of users and
  stakeholders in the basin, thus promoting an
  environment of shared vision WD based on
  trustworthy knowledge base, data and information

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Nile DST is able to generate

• Estimates of natural water resources regime
  (rainfall, runoff and river flow) in the Nile
  basin this DST component is also capable of
  simulating the impacts of various climatic
  changes on water resources regime in the basin
• Benefits and trade-offs of agricultural/irrigation
  development plans on other water uses and users
  in the Nile Basin
• Benefits and trade-offs of hydropower development
  projects on other water uses and users with
  assessment of firm and non-firm energy generation
  potential
• Benefits and trade-offs of cooperative and
  non-cooperative water management strategies
  (cooperative being understood as acceptance, by
  the Nile partners, of an integrated shared
  vision water resources management in the Nile
  basin aimed at maximising the benefits - as
  opposed to status quo, non-cooperation, and
  fragmented water resources management)

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Nile DST is capable to generate

• Benefits and trade-offs of potential, large
  scale, wetland conservation projects
• Assessment of the existing information gaps in
  the Nile Basin and identification of an "optimal'
  water resources monitoring network able to
  satisfy the increased future data needs.
• The system is capable of an easy and user
  friendly retrieval, storage, analysis and
  exchange of data, and information, including the
  DST outputs, between the Nile-DST and the
  geo-referenced database system established for
  the Nile Basin by the project
• The whole Nile-DST package is PC Windows NT
  based, developed with a user-friendly graphics
  interface and fully integrated with the
  geo-referenced database

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Main Characteristics of the Developed Nile-DST

• Nile-DST has six main components
• Database
• River simulation and management
• Agricultural planning
• Hydrologic modeling
• Remote sensing, and
• User-model interface.

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Database

• A comprehensive data warehousing structure
  capable of storing and visualizing
  meteorological, hydrological, climatological,
  agricultural, river basin management, demographic
  and spatial data
• It is an object-oriented, data structure
  developed to
• House all types of data (existing as well as
  future) required by water resources decision
  support tool
• To optimize data entry, access, visualization,
  and analysis
• All together, this database contains some 37
  gigabytes of information, the largest such
  collection ever compiled for the Nile Basin.

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River simulation management

• Simulates the Nile response under different
  hydrologic, development, and management scenarios
  
• Its overriding purpose is to objectively assess
  the benefits and tradeoffs associated with
  various water development, sharing, and
  management strategies that may interest the Nile
  Basin partners individually or as an
  interdependent community of nations.
• Tradeoffs exist among water uses in the same
  country and across the Nile countries

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Selected applications of river simulation
management

• RS M can provide answers to various important
  questions. Typical applications are
• Value of various regulation, hydro-power, and
  irrigation projects along the White, Blue, and
  Main Nile branches Such assessments could
  quantify the incremental benefits from individual
  development projects as well as the combined
  benefits from various project configurations
• Implications of reservoir regulation rules for
  local, upstream, and downstream riparians
• Marginal value (gain or loss) of irrigation with
  respect to hydropower at various basin locations
• Irrigation versus hydropower tradeoffs for each
  nation, region, and the entire basin.

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Agricultural planning

• AP component is developed to assess the crop
  yield potential and irrigation needs at different
  locations within the Nile basin. It can be used
  for the following applications
• Crop growth and production can be simulated for
  11 crops at any point in the Nile Basin, based on
  historical climatology
• The optimal quantitative relationship between
  crop yield and irrigation (the cropwater
  production function) can be determined as a
  continuous function from rain-fed to fully
  irrigated conditions
• Optimized irrigation schedules can be found for
  all points on the crop-water production function

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Agricultural planning

• By simulating for multiple years of climatic
  data, variability of crop yield and irrigation
  needs can be determined
• Irrigation management for individual farms or
  irrigation districts can include information on
  yield-irrigation relationships, irrigation
  schedules, and sensitivity to other parameters
  provided by the module and
• Long-term planning decisions can include
  agricultural assessment results for questions of
  water availability and sharing.

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Hydrologic modeling

• Hydrologic watershed ( rainfall-runoff) models
  provide the means to describe the response of
  river basins (stream flow and soil moisture) to
  different conditions of rainfall and temperature.
  
• A hydrologic rainfall-runoff model has been
  developed in a generic form and has been applied
  to selective Nile sub-basins where data allowed.
• The model applications are showing the
  significance and necessity of good quality
  hydrologic and hydro-meteorological data. Thus,
  including other existing data and the need for
  data quality control are clearly illustrated.
• Notwithstanding data limitations, the hydrologic
  model is applicable to any basin for which
  suitable data are available.

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Remote sensing

• RS component includes two remote sensing
  rainfall estimation procedures for all regions of
  the Nile Basin. The results are
• demonstrating the value of remote sensing
  information for rainfall estimation, and
• delineating the areas of the Nile Basin where
  estimation accuracy is fairly reliable (e.g.,
  Lake Victoria basin, Ethiopia) and those where
  better ground rainfall data are clearly needed.
• An application over the Lake Victoria and its
  watershed shows that remote sensing can enhance
  the value of conventional data and support water
  resources assessments and management.

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User interface

• The interface and data visualization tool
  provides a seamless system to look at all of the
  databases and the results generated by each DST
  module.
• At its heart is a tree-style exploring tool (data
  tree) that at once shows the entire contents of
  the Nile DST database and, equally importantly,
  allows the user to navigate down to greater and
  greater levels of detail.
• Each database in the Nile DST has a
  geo-referenced component and time series
  component.
• The geo-referenced data is viewed in the mapping
  tool, which holds a GIS. The time series data is
  viewed in the charting tool, which features a
  powerful chart and aggregation and statistics
  calculators.
• Together, the charting tool, mapping tool, and
  the data tree work seamlessly to provide the user
  with an ability to view any piece of information
  in the system quickly and meaningfully

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Conclusions

• The Nile DST models the entire basin system
  and assesses the tradeoffs and consequences of
  various cross-sector and basin wide development
  scenarios.
• It allows the impacts of various levels of
  regional coordination/ cooperation to be examined
  and quantified, serves as a cornerstone for
  information integration and enables for the
  first time ever all the riparian states to use a
  common water resources assessment tool.
• Assessments are expressed in quantities of river
  flow, water supply, food production, and energy
  generation. Building on these developments, it is
  now possible to introduce the next layer of
  assessment capabilities that can translate these
  physical outputs into economic and social
  benefits and impacts. Furthermore, a water
  quality component can be added to enable fully
  integrated assessments.

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Conclusions

• It is expected that these and possibly other new
  capabilities should be added to the Nile-DST
  through other projects in the basin, including
  the ongoing Water Resource Planning and
  Management Project being implemented under the
  Shared Vision Program of the Nile Basin
  Initiative.
• the tool also proved its value in assessing
  various information and data gaps in the basin.
• Last but not least, this type of modeling
  tools/ systems is considered essential in
  dealing with numerous water resources management
  issues in other international river basins - in
  Europe, Balkans and elsewhere in the world.

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History of Nile Cooperation

• Colonial Period Treaties
• Postcolonial Period
• Hydromet (1965 - 1993)
• TECCONILE ( 1993 - Feb. 1999 )
• Nile 2002 Conference Series
• Basin-wide Nile Projects
• Nile Basin Initiative (since Feb. 1999)
  supported for the first time by all the riparian
  states

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Nile Basin Initiative

• Organisational Structure
• Governed by Council of Ministers ( Nile-COM)
• Nile-COM supported by Technical Advisory
  Committee ( Nile - TAC)
• Nile Secretariat - provides administrative and
  logistics support to Nile-COM and TAC
• External PartnersWB,UNDP,CIDA, FAO, Italy
• Financing the International Consortium for
  Co-operation on the Nile (ICCON)

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Nile Basin Initiative Programme

• Shared Vision
• "To achieve sustainable socio-economic
  development through the equitable utilisation of,
  and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water
  resources."
• The Shared Vision thus puts economic development
  at its centre.
• Action on the ground
• Concrete Investment Projects at the Sub-basin and
  National level.

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Shared Vision Projects

• Confidence Building Stakeholder Involvement
• Assessment of Opportunities for Power Trade
• Environmental Analysis Management
• Efficient Water Use in Agriculture
• Socio-Economic Development Benefit Sharing
• Nile Basin Water Resources Planning and
• Management
• Applied Training
• Plus two ongoing basin-wide Nile projects
• Italy/FAO Project Capacity Building for Water
  Resources Management in the Nile Basin
• UNDP Project Legal and Institutional Framework
  for Cooperation in the Nile Basin