Evaluation of Streamflow under Climate Change in the Zambezi River Basin of Southern Africa

The Zambezi River basin is the fourth largest basin in Africa and the largest in southern Africa, comprising 5% of the total area of the continent. The basin is extremely vulnerable to climate change effects due to its highly variable climate. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of climate change on streamflow in one of the sub-basins, the Kabombo basin. The multi- global climate model projections were used as input to the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model for simulation of streamflow under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climate scenarios. The model predicted an annual streamflow increase of 85% and 6% for high uncertainty and strong consensus, respectively, under RCP 8.5. The model predicted a slightly reduced annual streamflow of less than 3% under RCP 4.5. The majority of simulations indicated that intra-annual and inter-annual streamflow variability will increase in the future for RCP 8.5 while it will reduce for the RCP 4.5 scenario. The predicted high and moderate rise in streamflow for RCP 8.5 suggests the need for adaptation plans and mitigation strategies. In contrast, the streamflow predicted for RCP 4.5 indicates that there may be a need to review the current management strategies of the water resources in the basin.

Implications of Misleading News Reporting on Tourism at the Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

The tourism sector plays a major role in the economic development of a number of countries in the Global South, particularly Southern Africa. One such country is Zimbabwe, which struggles with significant economic hardships and relies heavily on the tourism sector. The Victoria Falls, a key tourism attraction of Zimbabwe on the Zambezi River was the subject of a plethora of news articles published between November 2019 and January 2020. The media suggested that the world’s largest waterfall had dried up due to climate change induced drought. These reports arose during the dry season and were thus arguably ill-founded and downplayed the natural seasonal characteristics of the Zambezi River. This paper presents content analysis of these media articles and the phenomenological qualitative data analysis of interviews conducted with tourism operators in Victoria Falls. Although some of the articles published within this period strived for accurate reporting, some articles claimed that the Victoria Falls was dry, which was inconsistent with experiences of tourism operators. This inaccurate reporting is argued by the tourism operators to have negatively affected the tourism sector and destination image of the key attraction. This paper highlights the need for accurate science-based media reporting on weather, climate, climate change and the knowledge of the local tourism stakeholders within the tourism sector.

Nexus vs. Silo Investment Planning Under Uncertainty

Water, energy, and agricultural infrastructure investments have important inter-relations fulfilling potentially competing objectives. When shaping investment plans, decision makers need to evaluate those interactions and the associated uncertainties. We compare planning infrastructure under uncertainty with an integrated water-energy-food nexus framework and with sector-centered (silo) frameworks. We use WHAT-IF, an open-source hydroeconomic decision support tool with a holistic representation of the power and agriculture sectors. The tool is applied to an illustrative synthetic case and to a complex planning problem in the Zambezi River Basin involving reservoirs, hydropower, irrigation, transmission lines and power plant investments. In the synthetic case, the nexus framework selects investments that generate more synergies across sectors. In sector-centered frameworks, the value of investments that impact multiple sectors (like hydropower, bioenergy, and desalinization) are under- or overestimated. Furthermore, the nexus framework identifies risks related to uncertainties that are not linked to the investments respective sectors. In the Zambezi river case, we find that most investments are mainly sensitive to parameters related to their respective sectors, and that financial parameters like discount rate, capital costs or carbon taxes are driving the feasibility of investments. However, trade-offs between water for irrigation and water for hydropower are important; ignoring trade-offs in silo frameworks increases the irrigation expansion that is perceived as beneficial by 22% compared to a nexus framework that considers irrigation and hydropower jointly. Planning in a nexus framework is expected to be particularly important when projects and uncertainties can considerably affect the current equilibrium.