Africa: A Complex Picture

Hello! Welcome to my blog about water and environmental change in Africa. While the environment is changing rapidly on a global scale, Africa stood out with its characteristics. In this blog, I will create a series of posts addressing and discussing issues about water accessibility in Africa. By exploring different regional examples, I will look into how different regions, countries, or even towns adapt differently to various levels of environmental change in terms of accessing and managing water resources. Through evaluations of their approach, I aim to reflect on the relationship between water and environmental change holistically.

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Prior to start discussing different regions in Africa, I would like to address the importance of taking ‘variation’ and ‘complicity’ into mind when looking at issues about water and environmental change in Africa. This is not only because of the wide stretch of Africa’s latitude, the very different precipitation pattern, geological and hydrogeological setting it has, but also of its economical, social and political variations, such as its regional difference in accessing technology for adaptation in the rural and urban area, and different country’s political approach and cultural difference. By not making a generalisation about situations across Africa, a more neutral analysis can be made and therefore a more suitable solution can be offered to mitigate environmental change and gain water recourse.

Figure 1. Groundwater regions of Africa

This highlight on ‘complicity’ can be demonstrated with the example of groundwater management in Africa. It is commonly recognised that groundwater resources are distributed throughout the world in accordance with the “patchwork of climates and physiographic structures”. While in Africa, the variation in precipitation pattern, geological and hydrogeological setting is further highlighted. First of all the precipitation pattern in Africa, even though it follows a rather simple pattern geographically with maximum rainfall observed in Equatorial regions and decreases northward towards the Sahara and south to the Kalahari, but could also vary seasonally in different months of a year. Secondly, as the availability of groundwater depends primarily on geology, the difference in pore spaces and factors in different rocks dominates the amount of groundwater stored. It is also important to look at the geology of a place because if a place has a limited hydrogeological setting, its groundwater storage will be disadvantaged even if higher precipitation is presented. For example, Precambrian crystalline basement rocks occupy 34% of the land surface of Africa, mainly located in West Africa, Eastern Africa such as Uganda, and Southern Africa such as Malawi. This kind of rock has very little primary permeability due to its limited porosity. On the other hand, sedimentary cover rocks, with a preponderance of aquifers, covers mainly Northern Africa and the middle south. When we combine the information of precipitation and geology of Africa onto a map, we can see a more clear picture (Figure 1). For example, the island country Madagascar, with crystalline basement, and Chad, with sedimentary basins, will have a different level of accessing groundwater.

Why Water and Environmental Change?

Rainfall and river flow in Africa are highly variable over a wide variety of spatial and temporal dimensions, having significant implications for water resource management. However, as anthropogenic climate change becomes increasingly manifest, changes in the environment could cause possible overturns of previous solutions of water access. The limitation of water supply or just simply the waters in Africa due to environmental change could have a chain reaction that causes other problems socially, economically and politically. For example, extreme events such as flooding have caused substantial socio-economic disruption in Mozambique. Therefore, a study into the environmental change and its relation to water in Africa can help us to understand and mitigate consequential non-environmental problems.