Exploring Cooperative Transboundary River Management Strategies for the Eastern Nile Basin

Abstract

A water resource modeling process is demonstrated to support multistakeholder negotiations over transboundary management of the Nile River. This process addresses the challenge of identifying management options of new hydraulic infrastructure that potentially affects downstream coriparian nations and how the management of existing infrastructure can be adapted. The method includes an exploration of potential management decisions using a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm, intertwined with an iterative process of formulating cooperative strategies to overcome technical and political barriers faced in a transboundary negotiation. The case study is the addition of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and considers how its operation may be coordinated with adaptations to the operations of Egypt's High Aswan Dam. The results demonstrate that a lack of coordination is likely to be harmful to downstream riparians and suggest that adaptations to infrastructure in Sudan and Egypt can reduce risks to water supplies and energy generation. Although risks can be substantially reduced by agreed releases from the GERD and basic adaptations to the High Aswan Dam, these measures are still insufficient to assure that no additional risk is assumed by Egypt. The method then demonstrates how improvements to water security for both downstream riparians can be achieved through dynamic adaptation of the operation of the GERD during drought conditions. Finally, the paper demonstrates how the robustness of potential management arrangements can be evaluated considering potential effects of climate change, including increased interannual variability and highly uncertain changes such as increases in the future persistence of droughts.

Understanding and managing new risks on the Nile with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

“…To illustrate conditions in the new normal era, we start our simulation with both reservoirs at normal operating conditions (total storage of 79.6 bcm including 7 bcm of sediment in the HAD Reservoir [165.5 masl]), and total storage in the GERD of 70.4 bcm [637.9 masl]). As discussed in the Methods, we assume that the GERD is operated to produce a baseload of 1600 MW whenever possible 21 , and that target diversions remain similar to those of the filling era, except for modest increases in Ethiopia 10 . We select the 20-year historical sequence from 1934 to 1953 to simulate outcomes that we consider to be broadly representative of a typical sequence of low and high years, but without extreme multi-year drought conditions.…”

“…Both issues have been the subject of difficult, ongoing negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Previous studies of the GERD and HAD operations have sought to identify tradeoffs between different riparian objectives, and to understand the risks and rewards of basin-wide cooperation [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] . These efforts provide important insights that will inform multilateral agreements and create a structure for addressing the significantly different interests in the basin.…”

Global to regional scale evaluation of adaptation measures to reduce the future water gap

“…In the allocation scheme, the environmental flow requirement was treated as a water demand rather than a hard constraint, similar to demands from other sectors (SI-3.1). With the inclusion of environmental flow we deviate from other studies on water allocation (Wheeler et al, 2018) or water scarcity (Greve et al, 2018), but we also recognize that additional demands can be posed based on the variable flow method proposed by Pastor et al 2014, which was applied by Veldkamp et al (2017).…”

Evolutionary cooperation in transboundary river basins

“…However, cooperation in the Nile River basin has since returned to stage II (i.e., conflict) from stage III (i.e., initial cooperation), because of a lack of trust and a lack of benefit sharing mechanisms (Basheer et al, 2018). Although the NBI tried to encourage cooperation in the basin, an effective cooperation mechanism that includes effective benefit-sharing schemes and betrayal punishment measures needs to be further negotiated (Wheeler et al, 2018). This will provide evolutionary direction, allowing the Nile River basin to…”