1 Research Rocks, Sean Furey
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Helping Groundwater Research to Change Lives
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1 Research Rocks, Sean Furey
- 1. Research Rocks helping groundwater research to change lives RichardCarter Sean Furey MSc FRGS Water & Sanitation Specialist Skat Foundation, Switzerland Secretariat, Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN)
- 2. Overview • African Groundwater • The UPGro programme • Research Change • Next steps • Research Rocks – but can it change lives?
- 3. UP Gro Unlocking the Potential of Groundw ater for the poor AFRICAN GROUNDWATER losing st ream gaining st ream SeanFurey/Skat
- 4. 2012: first quantitative continent-wide maps of aquifer storage and potential published Groundwater – hidden wealth Groundwater storage (Source: MacDonald et al, 2012)
- 5. Complex natural & human processes GROUNDWATER RECHARGE RUNOFF RAIN SNOW HAIL FOG DEW EVAPORATION + TRANSPIRATION EVAPORATION + TRANSPIRATION SATURATED ROCK LAKE / RIVER WETLAND w ater pum ped for econom ic use benefits for agriculture, flood protection, tourism SeanFurey/Skat SeanFurey/Skat
- 6. Choices to be made Lim it abstractions to no m ore than the long-term average recharge. Sustainable yield M ixed strategy Planned dep letion for a lim ited period follow ed by abstraction at a sustainable rate. M ining Renewable Groundw at er ‘Fossil’ Groundw at er Soil and unsat urat ed rock Well/ Borehole Wat er level af ter sustained pum ping Long-term progressive dep letion, reducing the groundw ater reserves over tim e. “Living off the interest or earnings” “Spending som e of the savings follow ed by living off the interest or earnings” “Spending the savings”
- 7. UP Gro Unlocking the Potential of Groundw ater for the poor THE UPGro PROGRAMME
- 8. Welcome to UPGro • Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor (UPGro), is a seven-year international research programme (2013-2020) • We focus on improving the evidence base around groundwater availability and management in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to enable developing countries and partners to use groundwater in a sustainable way in order to benefit the poor. Professor Declan Conway Grantham Institute on Climate Change & Environment, LSE Chair of the Programme Executive Board of UPGro
- 10. The Consortium Projects (2015-19) 10 Hidden Crisis Grofutures Working in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda
- 11. The Africa Groundwater Atlas and Literature Archive • The most comprehensive catalogue yet available of groundwater literature for Africa. • more than 3000 of the indexed documents link to either the full text document or an online abstract. • Atlas will have country-by-country overviews of groundwater and geology 11 www.bgs.ac.uk/africagroundwateratlas
- 13. UP Gro Unlocking the Potential of Groundw ater for the poor RESEARCH CHANGE
- 14. Knowledge Broker 8,000+ individual members, from 149 countries Executive Committee: UNICEF, SDC, AfDB, IRC, The World Bank/WSP, WaterAid, World Vision Collaborations: Professionalising water well drilling (UNICEF-Skat-WaterAid) Member engagement: Webinars, training, e-discussions, events, peer- reviewed publications Events: Stockholm Water Week, IAH Congress, WEDC Conferences Partner Networks: SWA, African GW Network, IAH Knowledge exchange by research teams
- 15. 7th RWSN Forum: Water for Everyone 29 Nov – 2 Dec 2016 Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire Martin Laeng/Skat
- 16. But… • RWSN was a good start… …but only for rural water supply. • Interdisciplinary science: How do we engage with social sciences?
- 17. … and why should decision-makers care about groundwater? •Infrastructure projects: roads, water, urban extension •Economic & social policy: agriculture, small-holder farmers, urban healthcare MetaMetaResearch
- 18. Next steps • Stimulate discussion with African decision-makers and media and listen. • Support research teams to match up the evidence they can supply, with the questions being asked. • Learn from you on how best to do these. OxfordUniversity
- 19. Research Rocks – but can it change lives? •Improving projects and policies is vital... •… lasting change takes time … •… but there are some quick wins RichardCarter RichardCarter
- 20. UPGro Knowledge Broker: Skat Foundation, Vadianstrasse 42, CH-9000, St Gallen, Switzerland in association with the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN)
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, my name is Sean Furey. I’m a Water & Sanitation Specialist from an independent organisation called Skat, which was founded in 1978 as the Swiss Centre for Appropriate Technology. I’m British, but I’m based in the town of St Gallen in Eastern Switzerland. I was kindly invited to come and speak about an interdisciplinary research programme called UPGro – unlocking the potential of groundwater for the poor, funded by NERC, DFID and ESRC.
- Groundwater is the water held in cracks and pores within soil and rock. Groundwater comprises 96% of all liquid fresh water on earth. Globally about 25% of the flow in rivers comes from groundwater and more than half of all municipal water supplies worldwide rely on groundwater. So, it is an absolutely critical resource, but one that is often ignored or misunderstood.
- In 2012, this map of African groundwater was published by the British Geological Survey. What it shows – in a very broad way – is that many areas of the continent have huge groundwater reserves, and groundwater storage potential. The majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods – and the vast majority is rainfed. This region also has the some of the lowest access to clean drinking water. So potentially there is a resource here that can be used to reduced poverty, improve health and act as a buffer against climate change. Maps – promote more quantitative approach Storage (inter-annual storage & natural buffer against climate variability & drought) (comparison – Rainfall – 0.02 m km3; Freshwater in Lakes – 0.03 m km3); Large sedimentary aquifers in Libya, Algeria, Egypt & Sudan Many countries can support handpump yields (0.1 to 0.3l/s), some potential for higher yielding boreholes (>5l/s). Cannot assume high yielding boreholes for widespread use for irrigation or urbanising cities. But there are high borehole yields in the thick sedimentary aquifers (particilarly unconsolidated or poorly consolidated sediments) Good hydrogeological maps and studies for much of southern Africa, but lack of qualitative hydrogeological maps for north, west and central Africa. Small studies exist notably for Nigeria and Ghana Notes: Uncertainly range 0.36 to 1.75; specific yields (drainable porosity) about half of measured porosity …. -
- But groundwater processes – both natural and human, are complex and largely unseen. It is this invisibility that makes groundwater difficult to quantify and manage.
- The potential of groundwater is being exploited in many areas, with decisions being made every day – here are three basic strategies use the sustainable yield so that what is taken out roughly balances what comes in. mine the resource, get the economic benefit, and then move on or, use some of the fossil water and then live off the renewable supply. The problem is – without the monitoring, understanding or training, abstractors have no clue which of these strategies they are actually on. For example, there is so little data about the aquifers around Harare, the cities wells could run dry tomorrow, or never – right now they have no way of knowing.
- So that’s where UPGro comes in
- “Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor (UPGro), is a seven-year international research programme, between 2013 to 2020, funded by the United Kingdom. It focuses on improving the evidence base around groundwater availability and management in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to enable developing countries and partners to use groundwater in a sustainable way in order to benefit the poor. UPGro projects are interdisciplinary, linking the social and natural sciences to address this challenge. They will be delivered through collaborative partnerships between the world’s best researchers. The programme’s success will be measured by the extent that its research generates new knowledge which can be used to benefit the poor in a sustainable manner.
- In the Catalyst phase there were 15 projects that each ran for a year. They covered many different topics and involved over a hundred researchers from dozens of African and European institutions.
- We are now in the Consortium phase. Five larger projects began in 2015 and will run for 4 years in these areas of Western and Eastern Africa. They are interdisplinary, so this is not just about rocks and water, but fundamentally about people and their environments.
- Finally, the Africa Groundwater Atlas is the culmination of years of work by the British Geological Survey and nearly a hundred African hydrogeologists to dust off and digitise every scrap of groundwater information they could get their hands on. The result is an online database and wikipedia-style Atlas that will be launched in a few weeks.
- So what? This is my mantra. I keep challenging myself and others to explain why these activities matter.
- The UPGro programme was designed to have a Knowledge Broker team. This team started at the beginning of the programme and we will continued for at least a year after the researchers have finished their work. Our task is to make sure that all this investment and hard work gets further than an online academic journal – important though those are.
- First off, the research teams themselves do an enormous about work on advocacy, listening, influencing and encouraging uptake of their work. So how do we do this, and why a small Swiss organisation. Well, in 1992, Skat, UNICEF, UNDP and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) set up the Handpump Technology Network. The scope and membership of the network slowly grew, and in 2004 it become the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) and we still host the Secretariat and of the four thematic areas that we have, we lead the theme on Sustainable Groundwater Development. So although we are a global network, what we do best is African groundwater, so for us, UPGro was a match made in heaven. There are many different ways that we work to act as a bridge between the researchers in UPGro – and also for a new programme called REACH – but the two I want to mention are: Webinars: last year we ran 42 webinars in English, French and even a few in Spanish. We have found this a tremendously successful platform to allow our members to tell stories and share their research and their experience. Attendance is typically around 40-60 people, sometimes over a 100, and the library of recordings is being used as a resource and even for teaching. Collaborations: Talking is fine, but action gets results. RWSN holds the international standards for the India Mark II and Afridev handpumps, which are found in their millions across Africa and South Asia. Standardisation on a public domain design brought costs down and made supply chains viable. And for ten years, our collaboration with UNICEF, and now WaterAid, is leading to borehole drilling standards and training courses being adopted by both organisations and by countries like Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia – and hopefully soon Angola. These interventions are not quick fixes, they take a long time, but support from the academic research community is making things easier.
- We also organise conference every 5 years or so. The last one was in Kampala in 2011, and we currently organising the 7th Forum in Abidjan for later this year for around 650 participants – most of whom are NGO and private sector practitioners and government. You are more than welcome to come.
- But… so far I have been blowing my own trumpet and I’m am proud of what my colleagues and I have done. But, for the programme, we have to do more and we have some serious short-comings: rural water supply is only one groundwater use – urban water, agriculture, mining, transport, industry – these are big and powerful sectors than have a big effect on groundwater. We are only just starting to engage with these people. We also haven’t forgotten that these research projects are interdisciplinary and have strong social science components. I have no clue what the big social science issues, network or events are for Africa. All I know is that if hydrogeologists just talk to other hydrogeologists, we aren’t going to get that far.
- There is also a danger that as Knowledge Broker we think too much in a supply-side way: here’s a bunch of research, let’s tell everyone about it whether they are interested or not. So we need to find out where the fit is – why should decision-makers can about groundwater?. Where will the UPGro research have those most benefit impact? Probably in the funding and design of infrastructure projects and in the setting of economic, social and environmental policy. The photos is an example from one of the Catalyst Projects in Ethiopia: Roads drainage in much of Africa is a disaster – it leads to rapid soil erosion, siltation of water courses and before long the road gets washed away in a big storm. So what, if you designed the road in such as way that storm water is slowed down and allowed to infiltrate into the soil? More water seeps into the groundwater for later use and the gullying problems are massively reduced. This is what Meta Meta Research did with the local government in Tigray, Ethiopia and it has been tremendously successful. Suddenly, a road goes from being just a transport link to a multi-purpose land and water management tool – and a road.
- So we have made a good start as Knowledge Brokers – but there is so much more to do. 1. Stimulate discussion with African decision-makers and media and listen. 2. Support research teams to match up the evidence they can supply, with the questions being asked. 3. Learn from you on how best to do these.
- So, for me, UPGro research rocks – as a water engineer and a hydrologist it is so exciting and it is such an honour to be working with these world class researchers, some of whom are here this week. But can this research change lives? Evidenced-based policy would be nice, as would technically sound projects, but it will take time and patience to see change in these areas, so there needs to be a good mix of interventions – long terms ones that address some of the wicked, complex problems of poverty that we face, and few quick wins. I want to leave you with a quick one – there are organisations out there today, governments, private sector, well-meaning charities, that are installed galvanised iron pipes into boreholes with a low pH. That doesn’t sound very exciting does it, but what that means is that with 1-3 years that pipe will have probably rusted, broken and either no water will come out or it will be bright orange. If they used stainless steel or PVC, that problem wouldn’t happen. It’s not rocket science – actually it’s harder than rocket science because it involved the education and capacity building of tens of thousands of people so that these kinds of simple mistakes are avoided.
- End Slide