Browsing by Author "Dlamini, Dennis Jabulani Mduduzi."

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Assessment of the water poverty index at meso-catchment scale in the Thukela Basin.
(2006) Dlamini, Dennis Jabulani Mduduzi.; Schulze, Roland Edgar.
The connection between water and human wellbeing is increasingly causing concern about the implications of water scarcity on poverty. The primary fear is that water scarcity may not only worsen poverty, but may also undermine efforts to alleviate poverty and food insecurity. A review of literature revealed that the relationship between water scarcity and poverty is a complex one, with water scarcity being both a cause and consequence of poverty. Furthermore, water scarcity is multidimensional, which makes it difficult to define, while it can also vary considerably, both temporally and spatially. Finally, the relationship between water scarcity and poverty is a difficult one to quantify. Within the context of water scarcity, indicators are viewed by many development analysts as appropriate tools for informing and orienting policy-making, for comparing situations and for measuring performance. However, simplistic traditional indicators cannot capture the complexity of the water-poverty link; hence a proliferation of more sophisticated indicators and indices since the early 1990s. The Water Poverty Index (WPI), one of these new indices, assesses water scarcity holistically. Water poverty derives from the conceptualisation of this index which relates dimensions of poverty to access to water for domestic and productive use. However, the WPI has not been applied extensively at meso-catchment scale, the scale at which water resources managers operate. In South Africa, the Thukela Catchment -in the province of KwaZulu-Natal presents a unique opportunity to assess the WPI at this scale. The Thukela is a diverse catchment with respect to physiography, climate and (by extension) natural vegetation, land use, demography, culture and economy. While parts of the catchment are suitable for intensive agricultural production and others are thriving economic centres, a large percentage of the population in the catchment lives in poverty in high risk ecosystems, with their vulnerability exacerbated by policies of the erstwhile apartheid government. Many rural communities, a high percentage of which occupy these naturally harsh areas, have low skills levels, with a high proportion of unemployed people, low or no income and low services delivery. Infrastructural development, which relates to municipal service delivery, is often made prohibitively expensive by the rugged terrain in which many people live. As in other catchments in South Africa, the Thukela is affected by policies and initiatives aimed at accomplishing the objectives of post-1994 legislation such as the South Africa Constitution and the National Water Act. The potential of the WPI to assess the impacts of these initiatives on human wellbeing and to inform decision .making in the Thukela catchment was investigated. An analysis of a 46 year long series of monthly summations of daily values of streamflows output by the ACRU agrohydrological simulation model has shown that the Thukela, in its entirety , is a water-rich catchment. The reliability of the streamflows, which has implications for communities who collect water directly from 1 streams, is high along main channels but can be considerably less along low order tributaries of the main streams. The flow reliability along the small tributaries is less in winter than in summer. A high percentage of the catchment's population, in addition to being poor and not having access to municipal services, live near, and rely on, the small tributaries for their water supplies. Admittedly, this analysis addresses only one dimension of water poverty, viz. physical water shortage. Nevertheless, the study revealed that despite the Thukela's being a water-rich catchment, many communities are still water stressed. A more holistic characterisation of the water scarcity situation in the Thukela catchment was achieved using the WPI. A review of possible information sources for computing the WPI in South Africa found that many monitoring programmes, information systems and databases are either in existence and are active, or being restructured, or are under different stages of development. If and when they are all fully functional , they should be able to support national assessments of the WPI at meso-scale without the need to collect additional information. A combination of information from some of the active databases and secondary data from other local studies was used to compute the WPI in the Thukela catchment. The assessment uncovered the following: • There is an apparent association between water poverty and socio-economic disadvantage in the Thukela catchment. • There was an improvement in the water poverty situation in most parts of the Thukela catchment between 1996 and 2001, although the degree of improvement varied from subcatchment to subcatchment. Climate change, if it manifests itself by higher temperatures and reduced rainfall, will most likely worsen water poverty throughout the Thukela catchment, with the subcatchments in which many of the poor communities are located being more likely to experience the most severe impacts as the coping capacities of those communities are already strained under current climatic conditions. The findings of this study illustrate the potential of WPI as a tool for informing decision making and policy evaluation at the meso-catchment scale at which many water-related decisions are made.
Integrated water resources management studies in the Mbuluzi Catchment, Swaziland.
(2001) Dlamini, Dennis Jabulani Mduduzi.; Schulze, Roland Edgar.
Problems in the water sector range from degradation and depletion of water resources as a result of the impacts of land based anthropogenic activities, to the impacts of natural hydrological disasters and floods, while inadequate availability of water is at the core of most water related disputes in arid and semi-arid areas at local, regional, national and international levels. In the past, finding practical solutions for these problems fell neatly within the traditional scope of water resources management, which hinged almost entirely on economic viability of engineering oriented endeavors. However, a new set of management challenges has arisen following the high priority nowadays given to equity in water allocation and the protection of the natural environment above other issues. These new challenges have created a need for devising and adopting suitable management approaches, especially that would take social considerations into account. One of the approaches that provides promise relative to the new directions in dealing with contemporary water issues is integrated water resources management (IWRM). One objective of this study was to critically review the definitions and the fundamental principles of IWRM with the view of determining its applicability in developing countries and highlighting difficulties that may be faced regarding the adoption and implementation of this integrated approach. Swaziland is atypical example ofa developing country that is engulfed by the diverse water resources issues highlighted above and is currently engaged in updating water management legislation. Hence, Swaziland's experiences were used to put in perspective the key points and barriers regarding the adoption and implementation of IWRM. The catchment, the recommended spatial unit of IWRM, poses the first practical barrier, as catchments often cross both political and administrative boundaries, thereby creating the need for many water management problems to be solved across catchments with international security issues, cultural issues, different levels of development and different hydroclimatic regimes. The successful implementation of IWRM depends on effective participation of stakeholders. Lack of information flow between stakeholders of different backgrounds limits informed participation. Therefore, it is necessary to develop tools such as decision support systems (DSSs) that will foster easier multilateral information flow and aid decision making. IWRM requires information which itself should be managed in an integrated manner and be readily accessible. This is not always the case in developing countries with shortage of funds for data collection, manipulation and storage as well as adequately trained and experienced staff With the shortage of sufficiently long and reliable hydrological data for water management, the alternative is to synthesize records through hydrological modelling. Another objective of this study was to evaluate and test the suitability of the ACRU modelling system, a daily time-step agrohydrological model, to simulate catchment level hydrological processes and land use impacts as part of the assessment studies which form an integral part of integrated water resources management. ACRU was set up for the Mbuluzi, a 2958 km2 catchment in Swaziland. The catchment was subdivided into 40 sub catchments, after which the model was used for assessing both the impacts of land use and management changes on runoff yields and available water resources by evaluating present and future sectoral water demands, determining whether river flow from Swaziland into Mozambique meets the quantitative requirements of the international agreement existing between the two countries, and evaluating sediment yield and its spatial and temporal variation as well as its response to potential changes in land management. The physical-conceptual structure of the model, its multi-level adeptness regarding input information requirements, coupled with in-built decision support systems and generic default values make ACRU a suitable modelling tool in developing countries, as it makes it possible to obtain reasonable simulations for a range of levels of input information. Together with the model's multi-purpose nature, the ability of simulating ''what if scenarios", which was utilised in this study, makes it useful in the generation of information for IWRM. Future research needs which were identified include finding means of encouraging effective communication between scientists, water managers and other stakeholders, who may be "lay people". There is a need to conduct research that will lead to equipping ACRU with sediment routing and deposition algorithms, as well as routines to account more explicitly for dam operating rules and ecological issues, which would render its output even more useful in IWRM than the model's present structure allows.