Water-related issues in Africa

There is a rapidly growing concern about the water resources and the water cycle in Africa. The current water situation in Africa raises the following issues and challenges: Large fluctuations in the African climate systems result in floods and droughts. In turn, these water-related disasters engender large human and socio-economic losses throughout the continent. The variability of the African Water Cycle, and the cycle of floods and droughts, are resulting in pollution, and desertification and are thus increasing the vulnerability of the eco-systems, especially in the fragile and vulnerable desert and tropical zones. Africa is one of the most densely populated regions and has one of the largest population increments in the World. Desertification and environmental degradation result into increasingly serious challenges of water scarcity, including potable water, and food security. Many countries are worried about the possibly considerable impact of the global Climate Change on the water-related situation in Africa, which is already vulnerable and critical.

Forecasting the African Water Cycle

There is an urgent need for both the African and international stakeholders to better understand and better predict through modeling the variability of the African Water Cycle. Such better understanding and prediction issues are a prerequisite for the NEPAD priority of sustainable development. It is also necessary for achieving progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, the MDG, as underlined at the African-Union Summit of June 2008. Modeling, prediction and forecasting of the African Water Cycle can be facilitated by the enhancement of country’s capacity of interpretation of the available and relevant information relatively to the various water environments in the different regions. Hence the importance of capacity building in observation, geo-information systems and in modeling is outlined. Fostering exchange, cooperation and networking of scientists and patricians is also primary in order to help water related decision making.

African Water Cycle stakeholders and initiatives

In Africa, many national, international, independent programs, initiatives and associations are sharing the same goal and have a stake in the African Water Cycle. In particular:
AMMA: African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis is now being cooperatively implemented by:

• WCRP: World Climate Research Program
• GEWEX: Energy and Water Cycle Experiment
• CLIVAR: Climate variability and Predictability

TIGER: Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform is an European initiative was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2002. It aims at “assisting African countries to overcome problems faced in the collection, analysis and dissemination of water-related geo-information by exploiting the advantages of Earth-Observation Technology”.
GWSP: : Global Water Science Project one of the projects of the international Council for Science (ICSU) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). It has researched components in Africa.
TICAD: : Tokyo International Conference on African Development is a Japanese initiative, The 4th edition of the TICAD summit met in Yokohama, in May 2008. It acknowledged the importance of water as an indispensable resource for addressing development needs such as health, agriculture/food production, disaster risk reduction, and peace and security. Under the inter-governmental cooperative framework, a 10-year implementation plan (2003- 2013) for a Global Earth Observation System of Systems was agreed in Washington Earth Summit (July 2003) . Also at the third Earth observation Summit held in Brussels, in February 2005, a Group on Earth Observation, GEO, was formally established. The GEOSS mission is to realize a future decision-making environment wherein decisions and actions for the benefit of human kind are informed by and made in the light of coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observation and information. To accomplish its mission, The GEOSS seeks to “integrate heterogeneous information systems across technical, semantic, institutional and political boundaries to enable continuous monitoring of the Earth and access by a wide variety of researchers to a vast shared set of information resources” . Through better understanding of the water cycle, GEOSS is expected to help improve societal benefit areas such as disasters, health, energy, climate, water, ecosystem, weather, agriculture and biodiversity. In particular, the GEOSS is expected to contribute to the improvement of basis for decision making in water resource management. At the Hokkaido Toyako Summit in July 2008, the 48 Leaders called for the acceleration of efforts within the GEOSS. They underlined that GEOSS builds on the work of UN specialized agencies and programs, in priority areas, climate-change and water resources management. GEOSS accomplishes this contribution by strengthening geo- observation, prediction, data sharing and capacity building for developing countries in Earth observation, to fulfill the growing demand for Earth observation.

The Asian Water Cycle Initiative

Under the framework of the GEOSS, a fruitful experience with similar objectives has been implemented in the Asia-Pacific Region with Japanese leadership. The initiative consisted in the launching of the Asian Water Cycle Initiative (ASWCI) . This successful experience can be easily transferred to the African.

African Water Cycle Initiative

Thus in conjunction with MDG, NEPAD, TICAD IV main objectives, the Hokkaido Toyako G8 Summit of May 2008, and the African Union June 2008 Summit recommendations and under the GEOSS and GEO framework, we propose to organize an African Water Cycle Symposium, AWCS.
Specifically AWCS will aim at the:

• Introduction of the scientific and research themes related to the water cycle in Africa and their operational applications.
• Introduction of planned and on going operational or preoperational projects and systems related to AWC.
• Introduction of on-going AMMA, GWSP and TIGER initiatives demonstration projects.
• Demonstration of the value of the global integrated data sets to decision makers through the actual use of data by the on going GEOSS, TIGER initiative demonstration projects.
• Discussion of the systems interoperability and observation convergence in Africa.
• Identification of ways in which these activities can contribute to benefit the target societal areas of the water cycle of the GEO.

AWCS outputs :
The African water cycle symposium is expected to have the following outputs:

• Recognition of the on going- water cycle variations and identifications of the climate change risk
• Adoption of a regional and international cooperative approach for solving problems and adapting to variations.
• Establishment of a cooperative framework in cooperation with national governments, African and international institutes/institutions and research communities in order to exchange scientific knowledge and information on the water cycle in Africa.