Water Resources Management for Ensuring Food and Water Security

Today, water resources of most countries are under unprecedented stress. Given the fast growth of the global population, a 40% shortage between water demand and supply is projected by the World Bank by 2030. Moreover, climate change, climatic extremes and chronic water scarcity are threatening global water security. To achieve sustainability and strengthen water security, countries are investing in water resources management tools that will enable them to make optimal decisions under increasing uncertainty.The Blue Nile Basin (BNB), Ethiopia contributes over 60% of the Nile flow, and its water management decisions deeply influence all of East Africa. Despite the fact that the BNB has the physical resources to drive regional economic growth through irrigated agriculture and hydropower development, its exceptional climate variability and sensitivity to climate change have limited this development.This lecture will discuss water resources management of the BNB in general with a more specific focus on the development of an integrated surface water-groundwater model of the Lake Tana region, the source of the Blue Nile, which can be used as a tool for optimal water resources management. Model simulations using both a physically-based and a data-driven model are discussed and compared. The challenges are multiple – starting from the scarcity of the available in-situ data that inspired the establishment of a citizen science initiative involving high school students, to creating an accurate conceptual model representation and parameterizing the model to match reality as close as possible.The work presented here is part of an NSF (National Science Foundation) funded PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) project. This project is a multi-year collaborative endeavor that aims to craft state-of-the-art tools to enable smallholder farmers in the BNB make practical decisions about water, crops and fertilizers and ultimately gain more secure access to food and water in the face of increasingly challenging climatic extremes (http://pire.engr.uconn.edu).