Trade-offs and Challenges (WfW Programme)

Hello all!

In this post, I will elaborate more on the problems facing the WfW Programme in South Africa that I  spoke about last week, and my personal opinions on the contesting uses.

1. Tradeoff between Ecosystem Services: Carbon vs Water

In a separate study, it was found that afforestation of Pinus radiata (one of the invasive species) and the associated benefits of carbon sequestration and timber production are more economically viable than the benefits from increased water resources from clearing out invasive species at current water tariffs (Chisholm, 2010).  However, I beg to differ as water tariffs imposed on the forestry industry are estimated based on streamflow reductions from establishing the plantations, but they have hardly considered for the actual costs of land-use change and water losses for reasons below:

a) Streamflow reduction was estimated to be 90mm for Jonkershoek, a mere third of the actual streamflow reduction. Water tariffs were therefore priced much lower ("water valued [at a] fraction of one percent of the true value of water").

b) There are sunk costs from the loss of biodiversity from invading species, due to the conversion of Fynbos spp. to Pinus spp, and the potential uncontrolled invasion of P. radiata following future fires from warmer temperatures.

c) A treeless landscape associated with the Pinus plantations may lower albedo, rendering climate change mitigation ineffective from carbon sequestration.

d) Future increases in value of water, increasing water demands from population growth and decreasing supply from decreased rainfall in the Fynbos biome will seriously challenge the viability of afforestation. Continued large-scale afforestation will deplete the scarce water resources, increase water scarcity and possibly lead to large economic losses.

The article steers clear of establishing a conclusion for the future, as the net benefits between carbon and water depend on their future estimated costs. If the sum of economic benefits from carbon sequestration within the Pinus plantations were to outweigh the value of water at an extreme scenario of $257/tCO₂ in the event of extreme increases in carbon prices, an ecosystem services approach would call for the afforestation of trees at the expense of water resources as water and its associated benefits are economically viable only for carbon pricing scenarios under $100/tCO₂.

In my personal opinion however, water scarcity is clearly a greater developmental issue than increased CO₂, as the lack of water for domestic uses and consumption will seriously threaten livelihoods directly, while an increased CO₂ from a contracted carbon sink presents its risk to human health only in indirect ways. These may materialise in the forms of increased temperatures causing climate change and extreme weather events, but are arguably not as pressing as the lack of water to get by on a daily basis. These circumstances are when an ecosystem services approach may be lacking, as they do not consider for indirect benefits from water as a service providing unit; for example, 100ml of consumed water can be quantified in cost, but it may be tricky to attribute a value to positive externalities such as good health and well-being from the consumption of water. 

2. Challenges to Poverty Alleviation (McConnachie, 2013)

a) The WfW project only provides temporary employment, therefore making a small impact on the actual percentages of unemployed people within the country. Even so, the pool of unemployed people was from selection committees, and nepotism from local community leaders had disadvantaged the neediest.

b) The low wages for the poorest meant that workers were unmotivated, likely unskilled and inexperienced, leading to many wasted resources and fewer environmental benefits arising from inefficiencies (recall: concept of economic efficiency).

c) Beyond the two-year contract, the programme worsened the long-term livelihoods of workers as it diverted them from finding more sustainable income flows, but had not value-added to their lives and skill sets due to the low quality of training.

d) Clearing alien plants may actually have led to a loss of livelihoods for the poor who depended on harvesting timber and fuelwood in domestic trade and personal use (Wilgen and Wannenburgh, 2016).

In spite of all these issues challenging the personal development of the underprivileged communities, I still think highly of the Working for Water programme due to its well-meaning ecological and developmental intentions for South Africa. The effectiveness of public works programmes for poverty alleviation may potentially be enhanced by improving work conditions, providing employment benefits and imparting transferable skills into more well-paying opportunities within the agricultural sector. Ecological restoration based on the value of water however, should require a more detailed economic valuation of the true costs/benefits of water for greater economic justification.

Thank you for following through on South Africa for two weeks. In so far, I have mostly spoken about the economic valuation of ecosystem services. In my next post, I hope to talk more about non-monetary approaches to the valuation of water as an ecosystem service, so as to expand our understanding of what an ecosystem service approach encompasses.

See you next Thursday!

Conservation and Poverty Relief (WfW Programme)

Hello all!

I will write more about ecosystem services in line with poverty relief as mentioned in my previous post, and I hope this would contextualise the current state of human development in Africa within ecological objectives. After writing about the wetlands and rivers in the wetter regions of Africa, I will briefly share my thoughts about the semi-arid South Africa's Working for Water (WfW) Programme.

Working for Water (WfW) Programme, South Africa (Turpie et al. 2008)

In South Africa, the introduction of hectares of alien trees from afforestation had led to uncontrolled populations of invasive species which out-competed the indigenous tree species. These wiped out the original heterogeneity and biodiversity of the landscape and led to a presence of single-species strands of trees. Even though this invasion had presented forestry benefits (eg. timbre and carbon sequestration), these alien tree species had demonstrated a large negative effect on stream runoff. They were studied to have extremely intensive water uses and high losses through to evapotranspiration; the current invasion saw 15 invasive species utilising as much as ~7% of the runoff of the country (Wilgen et al. 1998). Their uniform presence within the landscape had reduced the catchment runoff drastically, especially in their situation close to watercourses.

In response to the issues of invasive species and water scarcity defined as 500-1000m³/person by Turpie et al. (2008), the WfW programme was initiated as a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) approach. Monetary payments were made to the poorest of the poor for their contribution to ecosystem restoration through the ambitious project to restore the presence of rivers within the landscape. They were offered two-year contracts to perform restoration work by clearing alien plants through slash-and-hook and chainsaw methods, at a minimal but nevertheless living wage (Wilgen et al. 1998).  In 2005, the WfW employed 32k people through an annual budget of US$68m gathered mostly from poverty relief funding, and evidence of success has been sighted through accounts of rivers running where water had been absent for several years (Powell, 2006).

The programme has been cited as a "win-win" solution as they achieve societal and environmental goals at the same time (McConnachie et al. 2013: 544): a) promote biodiversity and ecosystem services by restoring the pre-existing water ecosystem functions of the landscape, b) increase scarce water resources to the region at a lower cost compared to developing additional water supply schemes, and c) alleviate poverty by providing paid employment to the poorest communities in South Africa. It presents, yet again, the potential of attaching a monetary value to ecosystem services for the management of ecosystems.

I will carry out more research into this area, and elaborate more on the limitations of this WfW programme next week. See you!

Floodplain Inundation vs Irrigation

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In my previous posts, I spoke broadly about the different types of water valuation - monetary and non-monetary. In this post, I will elaborate more on the Hadejia-Nguru Wetlands example that I spoke about previously, and highlight the usefulness of water valuation for resource management.

Continuation from previous post: Case study of the Hadejia-Nguru River Basin, Nigeria (Barbier and Thompson, 1998)

The floodplain benefits outlined previously however, have increasingly been challenged by the other large-scale water resource schemes in the region, circled in red in Figure 4. The Kano River Irrigation Project (KRIP) presently irrigates an area of 22000 hectares (Tanko, 2010), while the Hadejia Valley Project irrigates an area of 12500 hectares (Kimmage and Adams, 1992). Both of these large-scale irrigation schemes have not considered the opportunity costs arising from the reduction in flood extent to the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands further downstream, and this case study quantifies the economic benefits of the floodplains by comparing the net agricultural benefits from the large-scale irrigation projects and the net values of the agricultural, fuelwood and fishing benefits of the floodplain.

A hydrological model was developed to estimate the impacts in flood extent on the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands from the employment of various irrigation scenarios - this may be familiar to colleagues who had similarly done GEOG2020 in the previous year.  To illustrate my point, I will only utilise 2 scenarios with respect to the KRIP described in Table 3. Using the estimated overall floodplain benefits (fishing, fuelwood, agriculture) of USD34-50/ha and the estimated agricultural benefits of the KRIP of US20-31/ha, the forgone floodplain benefits from the hydrological scenarios were quantified.

Table 3. Net loss from the operation of large-scale irrigation schemes.

	Description	Regulated releases (106 m3)	Differences in mean peak flood with baseline scenario (km2)	Net loss = irrigation value – floodplain loss (in US$)
Scenario 1	Tiga dam present, not in operation.	Naturalised flow from Wudil river.	0	0
Scenario 2	Tiga dam in operation. KRIP over area of 27000ha.	None	-150.62	-3362041
Scenario 3	Tiga dam in operation. KRIP over area of 14000ha.	400 in August.	-95.25	-2203912

Using these two scenarios, it is evident that a) a reduction in production by the KRIP, and b) provision of artificial water to replenish the floodplain, would reduce the economic losses by more than a million USD. The large-scale water resource schemes were disadvantageous to the Hadejia-Nguru river basin, and the way forward to minimise losses was to follow Scenario 3, where regulated releases are still supplied to inundate the floodplain to ensure the continued viability of the wetlands.

There were three main limitations to the case study:

1. The economic benefits of Tiga dam in supplying water to Kano was not quantified, but preliminary evidence argues that it is unlikely to be substantial enough to justify the substantial floodplain losses.

2. The full economic benefits from the floodplain has not considered for pastoral grazing and groundwater recharge, although this was quantified in a study few years later to be USD413/ha of irrigated agriculture extracted from the aquifer, with the potential loss in 1m of groundwater level valued at USD62249 (Acharya and Barbier, 2000).

3. There are other costs to dam construction and operation, eg. excessive flooding of schools and villages affecting households and livelihoods downstream of the Tiga, changes in fish stocks downstream, health hazards such as waterborne diseases from ponding behind the dam and waterlogging when farmlands are excessively flooded (Idris, 2008).

Summary and Thoughts

There have been other more recent studies on ecosystem benefits valuation of wetlands (McCartney et al. 2011; Turpie et al. 2008), but I felt that this case study on the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands would be relatable to most of us due to our acquired experience with hydrological modelling (and STELLA) in the previous academic year. It might therefore serve as a useful starting point to extend our knowledge on water resources and ecosystem services. Notably however, the case study dates to two decades back. The Hadejia-Nguru wetlands have been facing longer agricultural droughts in recent years, with the northern regions of Sub-Saharan Africa facing a 11% decline in rainfall, which is further threatened by the proposal of the Kafin Zaki dam construction (Shettima, 1997). Despite the delay for a few decades now, there has been no consensus on the intentions over the dam construction. It is therefore essential, and of strong economic justification, for regulated releases of water to replenish the floodplain during wet seasons, and to alleviate instances of prolonged droughts; this recommendation comes in contrast to the full implementation and further construction of the irrigation schemes as earlier proposed.

Although I find myself convinced that economic valuation of water is indeed the most practical solution moving forward for water resource management, I have also taken a strongly economic (and perhaps, rather inhumane) approach to valuing water, along with basic economic jargon such as opportunity cost. In my upcoming posts, I hope to bring a stronger human touch when writing about water and ecosystem services, in particular addressing livelihoods and poverty in Africa, and the potential for economic valuation to address these issues.

See you next week!

Types of Water Valuation

Hello all!

In my previous post, I spoke about the differing physical characteristics of countries within the African continent, taking examples from the wetter parts of Central and Western Africa. In this post, I will speak more about the different types of water valuation, in a bid to clarify further what "ecosystem valuation" means.

Monetary Approaches

Monetary approaches are directly influential on policy-making decisions, as they provide humans with accessible and comprehensible values of water through an economic unit. They are supported by the quantification service production, delivery and consumption, which necessitates the biophysical measurement of ecosystem services. These approaches have been classified as a "neoclassical paradigm" to address environmental issues due to their applicability in the modern context when development is causing the demise of many ecosystems (Pandeya et al. 2016: 254). They have been divided into use and non-use categories, and the values derived from both categories and their sub-units are subsequently summed up to form the Total Economic Value (TEV) of an ecosystem service - in this case, water. I have drawn up an example in Table 2 to hopefully explain this in better detail.

Table 2: Example of the Total Economic Value framework (by me).

	Benefit flow to humans per 1000 people	Monetary valuation per 1000 people
Tangible human benefits (provisioning and regulating)
Water for domestic consumption	100 gallons of water	Eg. $100
Water for crop plantation	3 ha of crops	Eg. $500
Water as a regulator of pollution	Reduced toxic exposure by humans and improved health.	Eg. $2000
Intangible human benefits (non-use)
Water for eco-tourism and education	People may study rare bird species in wetlands, gain cultural appreciation of species and be more aware of biodiversity.	Eg. $100
Water for increased forest coverage and greater carbon sequestration	Larger carbon store and reduction of global warming.	Eg. $5000
		= Sum of $7700

In this rough worked example, we can arguably already see some limitations immediately. How do we assign a value to all of these benefit flows for water? How do we value the education from cultural appreciation, and how do we value regulating services performed by water which may not be immediately obvious? Of course, a range of monetary valuation techniques have already been introduced and increasingly refined to estimate the value of all these ecosystem services. They can be valued in the form of market transactions - for example when drinking water is transacted between populations and water vendors, or when transactions with indirect associations are made when crops are transacted in the market. By correlating sustainable water resource management with economic well-being of people, it allows development boards to make informed decisions in the pursuit of development. They may even improve socioeconomic conditions, especially if biodiversity conservation is simultaneously pursued with ecosystem management (Adams, 2014).

Nonetheless, it continues to be challenging to assign monetary values to many uses, such as education, cultural heritage and the beauty of the landscape. As a result, non-monetary valuation approaches have also been set up in complement, to offer an alternative to the near impossibility of a wholesome monetary approach.

Non-monetary Approaches

These focus largely on stakeholder participation and group perceptions of ecosystem services. These stakeholders are tasked with assessing the cultural values of natural resources and services, their role in our improvement of social well-being, and their valuation in our lives. However, these non-monetary frameworks are often arbitrary as understanding spiritual values of ecosystem services are difficult, and the field is still relatively young at this stage when exact measurements are little found and made. nonetheless, for the valuation of ecosystems to be wholly useful in policy-making, it is integral to develop non-monetary methods for water uses that cannot be immediately quantified.

Some solutions that have been suggested include inclusive and participatory valuation of local needs, especially in data scarce environments such as remote mountainous areas. They combine citizen science with known and experienced human impacts on the water cycle in these regions where conventional data is not easily collected, with scientific processes of the hydrological cycle (Buytaert et al. 2014). These represent measures to make valuation processes more policy-oriented as they cater to local needs to increase the validity of the ecosystem services approach in a specific area.

However, as the field on ecosystem services is relatively new, most of these approaches have been suggested and acted on independently. For future improvements to the overall valuation of water and its associated benefits to human well-being, it is vital that both approaches are taken to provide an overall ecological underpinning of the decisions made on water resources. In my next few posts, I will use case studies to argue how valuation of economic services may help in water resource management, mostly through the monetary approach due to its current applicability in the field.

See you next week!

Ecosystem Services Delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa

Hello all!

In my previous post, I elaborated a bit on the physical characteristics of Sub-Saharan Africa. In this post, I will be using two case studies to illustrate the ecosystem benefits from water resources, from the previously mentioned wetter areas that span across Sub-Saharan Africa (western and central Africa).

The Hadejia-Nguru Wetlands, Western Africa (Barbier and Thompson, 1998: 435)

Figure 3. Hadejia-Nguru River Basin, comprising of the Hadeija-Nguru Wetlands (circled in blue) and the upstream irrigation projects of Hadejia Valley Project and Kano River Project (circled in red).

The Hadeija-Nguru wetlands are formed where the Hadejia and Jama'are rivers converge to form the Yobe River in Nigeria, circled in blue in Figure 3. Extensive areas up to 1000km² are inundated in August and September during the rainy seasons when the ITCZ shifts northwards as Nigeria lies at a latitude of 9°N (recall: physical characteristics of Africa); outside of these rainy months, the floodplains remain dry. Here is a brief list of the floodplain ecosystem benefits using the CICES framework:

1. Provisioning services: Earnings from sales and food consumption from agricultural products, grazing, fuelwood and fishing. Dry-season grazing for nomadic pastoral farmers. Agricultural surpluses for other cities. Migratory habitats for wildlife (eg. wader birds).

2. Regulation and maintenance services: Recharge of the aquifers within the Chad formation.

3. Cultural services: Ecotourism for educational and scientific purposes due to its rich habitat.

With increasing pressure from droughts and dam construction in the Sub-Sahara African region, it has been found that existing wetlands in Africa have increasingly fragmented into isolated pockets; natural wetland connectivity with the annual floods have therefore been lost (Stratford et al. 2011). I will expand more on the valuation of these ecosystem services for the management of wetlands later, as they are currently beyond the scope of understanding of this entry.

The Mara River Basin, Central Africa (Dessu et al. 2014)

Figure 4. The Mara River Basin, with the lakes and rivers outlined in blue (Dessu et al. 2014: 105).

The Mara River drains a combined area of 13,750 km² spanning across Kenya and Tanzania as seen in Figure 4. The Nyangores and Amala rivers are perennial due to the orographic effect from higher altitudes in the north, while the Talek and Sand rivers are ephemeral due to lower altitudes in the west. The livelihoods in the Mara River Basin rely heavily on these rivers for the provision of ecosystem services as seen below:

1. Provisioning services: Economic benefits from farming, livestock husbandry (major economic activity of Massai Tribe), and high-grade gold mining. Tea plantations, rain-fed wheat farms and commercial irrigation farms contribute to food security of Kenya. Forests contribute to economy through logging and charcoal burning.

2. Regulation and maintenance services: Recharge of sub-basins in low flow months of February and March. Carbon sequestration by the forest reserves in the north.

3. Cultural services: Tourism (accounting for 8% of all tourist bed nights, revenue of $20 million).

Similarly, loss of native forest cover, agricultural intensification, growing tourist facilities and pollution have altered the river's natural hydrological regime, resulting in lower low flows and higher peak flows. The population in the Mara River Basin however, is projected to increase through the 21st century, and the basin may therefore experience severe pressure on water resources.

In these two case studies, I have briefly covered the ecosystem benefits delivered by wetlands and rivers to the human population in two regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. In my next post, I will talk about methods of ecosystem valuation of water, and subsequently cover case studies of examples doing so.

See you next week!