Environmental Impact Assessment in Sustainable Water Resources Development: Major Issues of Consideration

The sustainable development of water resources is a multi-dimensional way of thinking about the connections or interdependencies among natural, social, and economic systems in the use of water. The purpose of environmental impact assessment is to guarantee a sustainable development that is in harmony with human welfare and the conservation of ecosystems and hence it should be clearly understood by all concerned. The main purpose of this paper is to review the current level of understanding of environmental impact assessment of water resources development; to assess the major challenges to sustainable environmental systems from water resources development perspectives, and to identify major environmental issues that need to be considered in sustainable water resources planning and development. During project study and design, major environmental impacts of water resources development should be identified and made available for decision makers and the public. In the arena of Integrated Water Resources Management, the environment should be considered as one of the legitimate users of water, and allotted reasonable amount of water for its sustainability. Hence, environmental flows assessment should be a mandatory condition for granting permission for project construction. Besides, as catastrophic flood events resulting from dam breaches are enormous, performing dam breach flood wave propagation and inundation mapping during the design phase of the project would support timely decision on the fate of the project or identifying mitigating measures to be taken. In the instances of shortage of geographic data, remotely sensed data can be analysed in GIS environment to generate data and map the information. Simulation models, coupled to GIS, would add GIS layers to provide clarity of impacts. To bring about environmental integrity of water resources development, the major challenges like population pressure, climate change, lack of proper planning and integration, policies and institutional arrangements should be properly addressed.Keywords: Environmental impact; assessment; Sustainability; Integration; Water resources; Development; Environmental flows; Dam breac

Advances in water resources research in the Upper Blue Nile basin and the way forward: A review

The Upper Blue Nile basin is considered as the lifeline for ∼250 million people and contributes ∼50 Gm3/year of water to the Nile River. Poor land management practices in the Ethiopian highlands have caused a significant amount of soil erosion, thereby threatening the productivity of the Ethiopian agricultural system, degrading the health of the aquatic ecosystem, and shortening the life of downstream reservoirs. The Upper Blue Nile basin, because of limited research and availability of data, has been considered as the “great unknown.” In the recent past, however, more research has been published. Nonetheless, there is no state-of-the-art review that presents research achievements, gaps and future directions. Hence, this paper aims to bridge this gap by reviewing the advances in water resources research in the basin while highlighting research needs and future directions. We report that there have been several research projects that try to understand the biogeochemical processes by collecting information on runoff, groundwater recharge, sediment transport, and tracers. Different types of hydrological models have been applied. Most of the earlier research used simple conceptual and statistical approaches for trend analysis and water balance estimations, mainly using rainfall and evapotranspiration data. More recent research has been using advanced semi-physically/physically based distributed hydrological models using high-resolution temporal and spatial data for diverse applications. We identified several research gaps and provided recommendations to address them. While we have witnessed advances in water resources research in the basin, we also foresee opportunities for further advancement. Incorporating the research findings into policy and practice will significantly benefit the development and transformation agenda of the Ethiopian government