Is the expansion of renewable energy the key for securing water, food and energy in Sub-Saharan Africa?: Water access (Part 1)

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has published an article called "Renewable Energy in the Water, Energy and Food Nexus" explaining the benefits of using renewable energy given the worrying situation we are living.

The extensive gives a summary of the benefits for each area of the water-food-energy Nexus and this are the ones related to water exclusively:

Water-Energy Nexus:
- Reduce water intensity of the power sector
- Improve access to water
- Enhance reliability of the water supply
- Bridge water gap in the arid regions

Water-Food Nexus:
- Improve access to and sustainability of the water supply for agriculture

In this entry I am going to look at whether the increase of the use of renewable energy is actually the solution for the challenge of improving the access to water. When assessing how to do so, it is often found that accessing groundwater is the most suitable way. The reasons why this is like this are described in the paper written by the British Geological Survey and the UK Overseas Development Institute

In this article, the author declares that communities that rely on surface water are very vulnerable to changes in climate and normally experience a reduction or complete scarcity of this resource during the months of the dry season. With the increase of extreme events due to climate change, surface water is becoming less and less reliable. Moreover, when available, surface water and shallow groundwater sources are very susceptible to contamination affecting the population’s health.

The solution to tackle this problem is to make groundwater more accessible for the communities. In order to reach deeper groundwater to try to avoid contamination, mechanised pumps are needed. There are different sources from which the energy can come from. Until now, petrol, biomass and diesel motors are the ones that have been mostly used.  

This article from Oxfam comments on many different problems that come with petrol generators. Firstly, these fuels are normally very costly and maintenance almost doesn't exist. Secondly, the processes to generate these fuels are very water intense. Hence, this worsens the problem regarding the availability of water resources in the future, as more water would be used to generate energy. Lastly, as communities need to reserve a large share of their income for fuel, they cannot spend it in other activities that will help them develop.

In this entry I am going to analyse a paper written by Clutier, M. and Rowley,

P. on the feasibility of renewable energy sources for pumping clean water in sub-Saharan Africa by which I will explore the ways by which energy can improve water access without worsening the situation of water resources and climate change in the future partly due to burning of fossil fuels. 

Summary: In this research paper, the authors compare the feasibility of using generation based pumps, solar and wind motorised pumps in three different communities on Central Nigeria. These regions are characterised by strong rains during the wet season and serious scarcity problems during the dry season. The paper clarifies before starting the comparison that “the potential of a renewable energy system is highly dependent on the available resource, which can greatly from region to region”.

When comparing the three different options, the article considers:

·      - The initial capital costs

·      - The cost of water (with a project life of 20 years)

·      - An annual inflation rate of 24,8% (average of Nigeria’s rate 1987-2006)

·      - Discount rate of 5%

When only looking at the initial capital costs, the petrol systems is much more attractive as its costs is a small fraction of the initial costs of installing a solar or wind system. Nevertheless, when you look at the cost of water over the life of the project (20 years), the cost of the petro systems are three to five times larger than for the other two systems. The reason behind this difference is mainly the cost of the fuel.

The authors then explore the effect of the inflation and discount rate. The interest rate chosen for the calculation is “very optimistic” and therefore, the article admits that if this was higher, then the water cost using the petrol system would be even higher. Moreover, if the discount rate would be 0 instead of 5, the petrol system would still be more costly than the other two systems.

Discussion: The article clearly achieves its goal of pointing out the enormous benefits that renewable system have as oppose to fuel systems to pump water from groundwater boreholes. The point I want to make here is about the discount rate. To begin with, the article does not give any supporting argument for why 5% is the discount rate chosen. There are lots of articles out there that prove that renewable energy systems are more feasible in the long term, but the truth is that there are more petrol pumps installed than renewable energy ones. My question is, does this occur because of an actual higher discount rate?

The article shows the following graph that represents the costs of water versus the discount rate. 

It can be observed that a higher discount rate will decrease the gap of the price between the renewable energy systems and the petrol ones. Therefore, further research should be done on the calculation of the discount rate when choosing one of the systems. There are different aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Availability of investment is an important one since the initial capital costs for renewable energy systems are very high. The main question we would have to ask would be: what do the population worth more, the cost of installation now or the cost of water in the future?

Effect of climate change on water resources in Africa: It’s happening

There are some people that still believe that climate change is a myth and it just has been made up. This is probably because they don't notice any important change in the climate. But the truth is that climate change is already affecting some parts of the world, and as the United Nations Environmental Programme suggests, Africa will be the continent the most affected by the changes in climate patterns. This is due to the geographical location, low income and institution incapacity to adapt the country to the changes (Conway, 2009). In this entry I want to dig in some of the effects the change in climate is already having on the water resources in sub-Saharan Africa.

-Flooding

The first main change Sub-Saharan Africa is already suffering from is flooding. According to Nagarajan, 2010, 26% of the natural disasters that affected this region between 1971-2001 where caused by flooding. I firmly believe the main reason why this is occurring is because traditionally, African communities have seen floodplains as the perfect place for settlement and for their agriculture activities due to the richness of their soil. However, these areas are now frequent scenes for important inundations. As an article from the Journal of Economics and Sustainable development on the impacts of climate change on water resources points out, “floods across Sub-Saharan Africa are reported to be the worst in decades in some places and extend in an arc from Mauritania in the west to Kenya in the east”. Flooding has a directly effect on the quality of water, deteriorating both surface and ground water due to an increase in groundwater recharge and consequently affecting mainly the population’s health and the quality of the crops. (UNFCCC, 2011)

-Droughts

Climate change is largely characterised by extreme events. While flooding is disturbing some places, others are seeing how what it used to be short-term droughts are increasing in time and becoming more extreme.

A report on droughts and aridity that can be found in the Hydrology and Earth Systems Journal indicates that aridity trends over Africa have increased during the 20^th century and they are expected to continually increase. As the study by Masih at al indicates, there are several causes associated with the droughts.  The environmental phase known as El Niño seems to be the phenomenon that affects drought the most. Nevertheless, the warming of the Indian Ocean due to rising temperatures seemed to be a mayor cause of the increasing droughts especially in East Africa. Droughts have a very important long-term effect on the amount of groundwater as groundwater recharge decreases when there are long periods of lacking rainfall.

Although the economical and social consequences of climate change will have its own space in this blog, I wanted to give a brief summary of what I think are the main issues with the variability of water resources in Sab-Saharan Africa due to changes in weather patterns. The economical and social effects these extreme climate events have are enormous and range from human deaths to immeasurable agricultural losses going through resettlement and migration problems. For example, in august of 2016, floods in Sudan affected 200,000 of people; caused 98 deaths; and over 20,000 lost their houses (floodlist, 2016). Moreover, Ethiopia faced this year one of the worst droughts they have had in decades leaving more than 400,000 children in risk of extreme hunger and most of the crops failed due to lack of rainfall. (The Guardian, 2016)

Introduction to the water-energy-food nexus

Hello!

Welcome to my blog! I have always wanted to start a blog but I had never gone down to it until now. Just to let you know, this blog is part of a module I’m taking this year called “Water and development in Africa”. Throughout this blog I expect to enlarge my understanding (and hopefully yours too) of the fundamental interconnections between the water-food-energy nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. I will be addressing the challenges these areas are currently facing and will face in the future, as well as analysing possible solutions regarding the water-energy-food nexus.

What is the water-energy-food nexus and why does it matter?

Commercial climate: https://climatecommercial.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/in-focus-water-energy-food-nexus-report/

The water-food-energy nexus is an approach to sustainable development that maintains that water, energy and food security can only be achieved if we look at the system considering the interlinks between water, energy and land as oppose to treating them independently.

The diagram above describes the whole system in which the nexus is integrated. Looking at the global trends we can predict that the world population and the urbanisation rate will continue to grow. Consequently, this will accelerate the demand for food that will be supplied by an agricultural sector challenged by the change in weather patterns due to the climate change. At the same time, while economies grow and cities expand, the demand for safe water by industrial and energy systems will also increase (Waughray, 2011).

The unsustainable use of water that has defined our system until now has to change in order to guarantee the access to safe water to every sector. Making an efficient use of the available water resources to create more with less and doing it in a sustainable manner will guarantee the water supply, food and energy security in the future. No one has said is an easy task. It will need the collaboration of research, economic analysis and policy formulation to confront the challenging future (Waughray, 2011). Both, the public and the private sector, play a vital role in this approach. They need to work together to improve the management of these three sectors and to find solutions to the problems before its too late.

Looking closer into Sub-Saharan Africa

In order to recognise the challenges Sub-Saharan Africa is facing, first it is important to describe the current situation for each sector separately:

--> Domestic water demand: It corresponds to the water use for fulfilling households’ needs and municipal and commercial activities. Urban households normally have access to water gained from reservoirs and delivered by piped systems. Rural households generally collect water from individual sources such as rainfall, springs and boreholes (Thompson, 2010). Even though urban households have access to piped systems, they are not completely reliable thus they use supplementary individual sources to meet their needs. The share of domestic water use corresponds to 13% of the overall water use*.

--> Water use for energy production: The water use for energy production is very high compared to the energy they actually produce. This is due to the high share of energy that comes from traditional biomass. (World energy council, 2010). Overall, the industry sector uses 13% of the total water use*.

--> Water use for agriculture: Currently only 5% of all the cropland in Africa is irrigated but small-scale irrigation systems including ground water irrigation is the most rapidly expanding type of irrigation in Africa (Taylor, 2004). At this time, the total area for ground water irrigation use represents 20% of total irrigated area (Villholth, 2013) and the share of water for agricultural use is of 69%*.

How is this expected to change?

--> Domestic water demand: The population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase and therefore the water demand will increase with it. Even though cities are expected to keep increasing their population, evidence shows that rural population will keep having an important role in sub-Saharan countries. As a consequences, both rural and urban water demand are expected to keep rising.

--> Water use for energy production: As population increases and countries continue developing economically, energy demand will rise as well and therefore this will increment the quantity of water needed to produce the energy in order to satisfy the demand.

--> Water use for agriculture: "FAO estimates that food demands in sub-Saharan Africa alone will more than triple between 2000 and 2050 in response to increased population and improved diets" (FAO, 2011). To satisfy this demand, water use for this sector will need to increase as well.

To conclude, increasing water demand needs to be met in the context of an uncertain future due to the effect of climate change. The extend to which it will be met will depend on the efforts we currently put into this challenge. I believe bringing new sustainable and interconnected approaches into the picture is probably the most thoughtful pathway society as a whole should follow.

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, 2011. Water for agriculture and energy in Africa. The challenges of climate change. [pdf] Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2345e/i2345e.pdf [Accessed 13 October 2016]

Taylor, R.G., 2004. Water Resources and development challenges in eastern and southern Africa . In: T. Bowyer-Bower and D. Potts (Eds.), East and Southern Africa . Regional Development Text, RGS-IBG Developing Areas Research Group, Addison-Wesley Longman (London), Chapter 7, pp. 198-228.

Thompson, J. et al., 2000. Waiting at the tap: changes in urban water use in East Africa over three decades. Environment and Urbanisation, Vol. 12(2), pp. 37-52.

Villholth, K., 2013. Groundwater irrigation for smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa – a synthesis of current knowledge to guide sustainable outcomes. Water International, Vol. 38, 369-391.

Waughray, D., 2011. Water security: the water-food-energy-climate nexus. The World Economic Forum water initiative. Washington DC: Island Press

World Energy Council, 2010. Water for energy. [pdf]. Available at:

https://www.worldenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/PUB_Water_For_Energy_2010_WEC.pdf [Accessed 13 October 2016]

*Domestic water use data from powerpoint of lecture 2: water use & provision