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Photo: Ethiopia, by Trevor Cole on Unsplash
In this Issue
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The Project
DAFNE is a four-year project funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action category. This project is being carried out in the transboundary Zambezi and the Omo river basins in Africa. It investigates how water, energy and food are managed in these areas and explores options for sustainable and integrated management for the future together with stakeholders from the two regions.
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DAFNE celebrates its first birthday
Paolo Burlando, Hydrology and Water Resources Management, ETH Zurich
and DAFNE Project Coordinator
The beginning of September 2017 marked the first birthday of DAFNE, a year of many events and activities. The outcomes of these activities were discussed together with future project plans at the General Assembly (GA) that took place September 21and 22 and was hosted by our Belgian project partners, KU Leuven.
The GA was not only the event for taking formal planning decisions, but also offered partners the opportunity to report on the activities of the first year and to learn more about the highlights of the scientific progress that each partner achieved. Pre- and post-GA meetings of the project work package teams, which focused on the more technical aspects of the project’s implementation, complemented the assembly.
The first GA after the kick-off meeting allowed us to verify the progress of the project, but, more importantly, offered the opportunity to test the cohesion level that the DAFNE could reach in the first twelve months of its life. It was a pleasure to observe that the integration of the efforts among the partners was achieved through joint and complementary activities, which form the backbone of the project. This was not taken for granted given the diversity of the scientific backgrounds of the partners and the need to create a common scientific language that connects engineering and natural sciences with social and economic disciplines. Both these aspects are a key to working with the stakeholders to identify the policy options that form the basis of the Decision-Analytic-Framework to analyse the Water-Energy-Food nexus.
The lively discussions and the presentation of the initial accomplishments demonstrated that significant progress has been made. These also triggered important decisions on actions needed to ensure an even better common understanding and integration of project activities. These decisions concerned both the integration of the various sectoral models of the WEF Nexus and of its economic and societal implications, as well as the interaction with the stakeholders. The latter was successfully formalised in the first Negotiation Simulation Laboratory (NSL, see article below) with stakeholders in the Zambezi Basin which took place in Lusaka shortly before the GA. The outcomes of the Zambezi NSL workshop were reviewed in our joint meetings and we took the decision to further develop the strategy to be used in these events with stakeholders in order to capitalise on the success of this workshop and strengthen the trust that was generated among the stakeholders involved.
In summary, the first General Assembly demonstrated that DAFNE is a still young but healthy and growing project that, after one year, can benefit from some fine tuning. But it also benefits from a solid conceptual foundation that forms the basis for a success story. We invite you to continue reading our newsletter to experience some of the more concrete DAFNE results in the last few months.
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Zambezi stakeholders in the Negotiation Simulation Lab
Ethel Mudenda, School of Agricultural Sciences, University of Zambia and Caroline van Bers, Institute of Environmental Systems Research, Osnabrueck University, Germany
DAFNE’s first Negotiation Simulation Lab (NSL) for the Zambezi Basin took place in Lusaka, Zambia on September 11 and 12. Representing the three sectors - water, energy and food – the stakeholders participating in the workshop met with project partners to discuss emerging issues and the actions and solutions that promote sustainable resource use in the WEF Nexus. Using participatory mapping the stakeholders jointly examined the current situation in the basins as a whole and in specific sub-basins, the Luia in Mozambique and the Lunsemfwa in Zambia and identified actions, both planned or hypothetical to address the some of the significant concerns.
After an introduction to the project by DAFNE coordinator, Paolo Burlando of ETH Zurich, the local case study coordinators provided an overview of the subbasins: Jaime Palalane of Eduardo Mondlane University presented the Luia catchment and Imasiku Nyambe of the University of Zambia provided a profile of the Lunsemfwa. They also described the criteria for choosing the these catchments including the presence of water (tributaries of the Zambezi), the presence of and potential for significant hydropower generation, the expansion of irrigated agriculture, and in some areas rapidly increasing populations, all of which contribute to (potential) competition for water.
Using large catchments maps, the participants elaborated openly on issues affecting their sectors in their respective catchments, examined currently planned actions to address these issues, and provided what they believe to be further potential planning and management solutions to these concerns. There was a clear willingness and interest among participants to try to understand the perspectives of those representing other sectors and viewpoints.
Some of the general issues identified in the mapping session that are common in the Zambezi basin in general include lack of data, deforestation and accompanying significant losses of biodiversity, and access to irrigation water and the resulting competition with hydropower needs.
On the second day of the lab project partners outlined the importance of visualizations tools for exploring and analyzing potential actions and solutions with stakeholders. The Geoportal is the GIS-based online tool being developed in the project for this purpose and to present spatially distributed information and provide quick access to physical variables and indicators of the basin system. The eventual hosting and use of the Geoportal by a Zambezi basin organization after the completion of the project was also an important theme for participants.
The meeting made clear the need to focus in future meetings on developing a better understanding of how the Geoportal can be used and embedded in the basin. While online meetings are planned and encouraged as they are easier to organize and less costly, the participants asked if DAFNE partners could look for opportunities in the next months and years to hold face-to-face meetings. DAFNE partners welcomed the interest and enthusiasm of the stakeholders in continuing a regular exchange.
Images of the NSL event are available on the DAFNE website here.
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Data for modelling the Water-Energy-Food nexus in two transboundary basins
Stefaan Dondeyne, KU Leuven, Belgium with Fabian Niggemann, VISTA, Germany
Making good use of Africa’s huge resources in water and other natural resources is key for building a prosperous future for its peoples.Water is vital for daily domestic uses, for industrial uses and for producing electricity and boosting agricultural production by irrigating crops. Moreover, water resources are also key to important and often very large natural habitats in Africa. Within the DAFNE project we are developing a decision-analytic framework to explore the water-energy-food nexus in complex and trans-boundary water resources systems of fast growing developing countries, whereby we focus on the Lake Turkana basin, which includes the Omo-Gibe river basin, in eastern Africa and the Zambezi river basin in southern Africa.
The quality of any decision analytic framework relies on the reliability and quality of data on climate, hydrology, land-use, agriculture, biodiversity, fisheries, socio-economic dynamics and policy setting. In the first year of the project we have been tracing and compiling data that will be used to model the water-energy-food nexus in the two case study basins. The first, and most ubiquitous type of data, are large freely available data available on the internet. For example, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data (SRTM data) based on which digital elevation models are developed with a spatial resolution of 30 by 30 m are directly relevant (Fig. 1).
 Fig 1 – Example of a topographic map derived from SRTM data with a spatial resolution of 30 by 30 m; the river network is equally derived from such digital elevation models (source: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/)
Climatic data, spatially interpolated based on long-term historical records, and meteorological data derived from satellites are also available on the net (Fig. 2a). Environmental data such as soil properties have also been spatially interpolated based on legacy soil data (Fig. 2b). A second type of data is that derived from primary remote sensing data. For example, for modelling the hydrology data on “leaf area indices”, as a characteristic of crop and vegetation cover, it is important to assess evapotranspiration. This can be estimated, for example, from LandSat images (Fig. 3). A third type of data are long term records from field observations. For the hydrological modelling data, rainfall and river discharges are particularly critical (Fig. 4) for both calibrating the models and for validating the results. These data are identified and provided by the project partner organizations and stakeholders in Africa.
 
Fig. 2 – (a) Rainfall estimates of 11th May 2017 based on remote sensing data (source: https://www.tamsat.org.uk/); and (b) estimates of available soil water capacity (source: http://www.isric.org/explore/soilgrids) for both the Zambezi basin and Omo-Gibe river and Lake Turkana basin
Fig 3 – Example of Leaf Area Indices derived Landsat images
(source: own processing based on Landsat data obtained on https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/)
Fig 4 – Long term data of discharges of the Shire river in Liwonde (Malawi); (source: Ministry of Water, Malawi)
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First DAFNE field visit to Lunsemfwa river study area
Fritz Kleinschroth, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
The catchment of the Lunsemfwa River is located in a fertile area of Zambia’s Central Province between the urban centres of the capital Lusaka and the Copperbelt. Due to its importance for both agriculture and hydropower production, it has been identified as one of the case study areas in the Zambezi basin. July 2017 offered a window of opportunity for a collaborative field visit of a small group of researchers from the University of Zambia, KU Leuven and ETH Zürich to get to know the landscape and talk with some of the stakeholders.The catchment of the Lunsemfwa River is located in a fertile area of Zambia’
The field trip showed clearly that the Lunsemfwa catchment is a good example for understanding the water-energy-food nexus. According to the main hydropower company in the area, the demand for electricity production is constantly increasing to supply both the mining industry and private households with energy. Yet water stored in the reservoirs behind the two old dams in the area is dwindling, especially in the face of recent drought years. Just upstream of the hydropower dams are rapidly expanding agricultural areas. Farmers here have built small dams to collect water to irrigate their crops during the dry season. Both farmers and the hydropower company plan an own large new dam in the area to increase their capacities and bridge future shortages.However, it remains unknown how these dams will affect each other as well as the ecosystems in the area. Another layer of complexity is represented by many other stakeholders in the region using available water and other natural resources in an unplanned way. Most people and their livelihoods in the wider landscape depend on small-scale rainfed agriculture along rivers and within a mosaic of remaining Miombo woodlands that are in decline due to deforestation for agricultural land and charcoal production.
The significant recurring question during the field trip was how much water is actually available in the system. A better estimate of this would support dialogues on who should have access to how much water while leaving enough in the system to maintain underlying ecosystems. Here, DAFNE seems to be in the right place at the right time with its goal to produce a hydrological model that can reproduce the hydrology of the river and the influence of managed infrastructure and water resources, as well as a decision-analytic framework that addresses how these resources can best be distributed.
Left: A dam to channel the Lunsemfwa River for hydropower production;
Right: a centre pivot system to irrigate a wheat field during the dry season.
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In each issue of the newsletter, we profile in brief the project activities of a DAFNE partner, and this month we iare pleased to introduce our newest partner, Water and Land Resource Centre in Ethiopia.
The Water and Land Resource Centre (WLRC) is an autonomous centre affiliated with Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) with a mandate of water and land resource research for sustainable development. Under the direction of Dr. Gete Zeleke, WLRC is generating and managing knowledge about Integrated Water and Land Resource Management (IWLRM), hydro-sedimentology and natural resource governance, on the one hand, and working to build capacities of key stakeholders pertaining to water and land management, on the other. The Centre’s outputs are intended to provide evidence-based information and knowledge and useful products for policy and practice on water and land management to be used at multiple scales. The Centre also strives to build model cases of knowledge-based IWRM, which are known at an international level.
WLRC officially joined the DAFNE consortium on April 26, 2017. Its focus in the project will mainly address the case study of the Omo Basin, where the Centre will – together with partners – develop a baseline scenario, facilitate a series of stakeholder meetings and engagements, and participate in WEF nexus analysis and modeling and the identification of pathways to sustainable development. The Centre will also serve as a hub for DAFNE researchers in Ethiopia and is going to liaise with stakeholders in order to bring the project to the local level.
by Dr. Amare Bantider, WLRC
New researcher at ETH Zurich: Scott Sinclair
Scott holds a PhD (Eng) on the use of remote sensing for rainfall estimation and forecasting as input to flash flood forecasting systems. His recent work has involved spatially distributed Evapotranspiration estimation using automatic weather station data and numerical weather model predictions, programming and spatial data manipulation and the implementation of soil moisture estimation algorithms based on distributed hydrological modelling. He has a keen interest in reproducible research and open source software in science. Scott is working on hydrological modeling for DAFNE and supporting the coordination role of Paolo Burlando.
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This section of our newsletter is devoted to introducing our post-graduate and post-doctoral researchers. We are delighted to have them involved in the project.
Federica Bertoni is a PhD Student at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Federica received an MSc degree in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2016. She joined the EU Erasmus+ Program spending the entire 2015-16 academic year at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where she also carried out her Master Thesis work entitled, “Exploring the Water-Energy Nexus in the Iberian Peninsula under Climate Change: A Deterministic Optimization Approach”. She is currently a PhD student in Information Technology in the Natural Resources Management group ( http://www.nrm.deib.polimi.it) at Politecnico di Milano. Federica’s main research interests include water resources management and planning under climate change, multi-objective robust optimization, and water-energy-food nexus. In the DAFNE project, she is working on the development of robust optimization algorithms for combining planning and management adaptation strategies (e.g., hydropower development and operations) to changing climatic and socio-economic conditions in the Zambezi basin
Brian Carthy is a Master's student at KU Leuven in Belgium
Brian’s initial field of study was in Sustainable Energy. Throughout his Bachelors, he developed a great interest in water resources. After working in the food industry, he came to study the IUPWARE Water Resources Engineering Masters at KU Leuven. Joining the DAFNE project allows him to bring together his two fields of interest in water and energy and to examine their interactions in a fascinating setting. The topic of study for his Master thesis is ‘The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Investigating land cover and hydrological change in the Shire Basin, Malawi’.
Matteo Giuliani is an assistant professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Matteo received a double MSc degree in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, and a PhD in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano. His research interest focuses on Integrated Water Resources Management, including multi-objective optimization and control, decision-making under uncertainty, and multi-agent systems. In the DAFNE project, he is working on the multi-objective robust optimization of adaptation pathways for the Zambezi and Omo river basins, the exploration of Water-Energy-Food tradeoff, and the generation of future scenarios with changing climatic and socio-economic forcing. To learn more about his work, visit http://giuliani.faculty.polimi.it.
Marta Zaniolo is a PhD Student at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Marta received an MSc degree in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and is currently a PhD student in Information Technology in the Natural Resources Management group ( http://www.nrm.deib.polimi.it) at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests include integrated water resources management, drought management and prediction, information theory for drought indexes, and climate teleconnection analysis. In the DAFNE project, she is working on improving reliability and system-wide efficiency of the Omo river basin management through more informed decisions, also accounting for changing climatic and socio-technical forcing. |
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IMPREX is a Horizon 2020 EU project designed to support the reduction of Europe’s vulnerability to extreme hydrological events through improved understanding of their current as well as future intensity and frequency, which may be very different from today’s reality. IMPREX is built upon a strong team of experts from public and private sector organisations as well as universities and research institutes with complementary skills and experiences. The direct involvement of a broad range of users from key economic sectors will ensure the relevance of the project outputs.
The main project’s goal is to substantially improve our capability to forecast hydrological extremes and their impacts over short to seasonal time scales. Politecnico di Milano, one of the partners involved in DAFNE, is contributing to IMPREX by assessing the operational value of medium- to long-term weather/hydrological forecasts, drought indexes, and climate teleconnections for agriculture and hydropower in the Lake Como basin in Italy. Moreover, the impacts of climate change on these two sectors are also explored.
The methodologies developed in IMPREX can potentially be transferred to DAFNE and contribute to the design of efficient and robust pathways addressing future developments of the water-energy-food nexus in both the Zambezi and the Omo river basins.
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Bertoni, F., Giuliani, M. and Castelletti, A. 2017. Scenario-based fitted Q-iteration for adaptive control of water reservoir systems under uncertainty. Proceedings of the 20th IFAC World Congress, Toulouse, 9-14 July.
This study presents a novel approach called scenario-based Fitted Q-Iteration (sFQI) for controlling water reservoir systems under climate uncertainty. The proposed algorithm allows the design of adaptive control policies by enlarging the state space to include the space of the uncertain system’s parameters, thus obtaining a control policy for any scenario in the uncertainty set with a single learning process.
Giuliani, M., Quinn, J.D., Herman, J.D., Castelletti, A. and Reed, P.M. 2017. Scalable Multiobjective Control for Large-Scale Water Resources Systems Under Uncertainty. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. doi: 10.1109/TCST.2017.2705162
This study contributes a massively parallel implementation of the evolutionary multi-objective direct policy search method for controlling large-scale water resources systems under uncertainty, which combines direct policy search with nonlinear approximating networks and a hierarchical parallelization of the Borg multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. This computational framework successfully identifies control policies that address both the presence of multidimensional tradeoffs and severe uncertainties in the system dynamics and policy performance.
Koundouri, P., Pittis, N., Samartzis, P., Englezos, N. and Papandreou, A. (Forthcoming 2017). Alternative Types of Ambiguity and their Effects on the Probabilistic Properties and Tail Risks of Environmental-Policy Variables. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP).
The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effects from the interaction between decision makers (DMs) and experts’ forecasts in a climate change framework. Various forms of such interactions are analyzed, with each one generating a different level of ambiguity in either DMs and/or the experts. We distinguish between preferential ambiguity, which is defined as the experts’ uncertainty about DMs preference variables, and deferential ambiguity, which stems from the potential difficulty of DM to decide which of the experts should refer to. Both types of ambiguity have significant effects on the probabilistic properties of environmental policy variables, such as carbon dioxide emissions. With respect to the policy-relevant question of whether these types of ambiguity increase the probability of a "tail event", where a large change in the price of the environmental variable is experienced, we show that the answer depends on the probabilistic properties of DMs preference variable compared to that of the society, on the extent to which DM learns from experience, on how DM combines experts’ information, and on the pattern of interaction between preferential and deferential ambiguity.
Lautze, J., Phiri, Z., Smakhtin, V., Saruchera, D. 2017. The Zambezi River Basin: Water and Sustainable Development. Routledge.
This book provides a thorough review of water and sustainable development in the Zambezi, in order to identify critical issues and propose constructive ways forward. It begins by reviewing the availability and use of water resources in the basin, outlines the basin’s economic potential and highlights key concerns related to climate vulnerability and risk. Focus is then devoted to hydropower and the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, sustainable agricultural water management, and threats and opportunities related to provision of ecosystem services. The impact of urbanisation and water quality is also examined, as well as ways to enhance transboundary water cooperation. Last, the book assesses the level of water security in the basin, and provides suggestions for achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6. Emphasis is placed on entry points for basin-level management to foster improved paths forward.
Quinn, J.D., Reed, P.M., Giuliani, M. and Castelletti, A. 2017. Rival Framings: A framework for discovering how problem formulation uncertainties shape risk management trade-offs in water resources systems. Water Resources Research 53(8), 7208–7233. doi: 10.1002/2017WR020524
This study illustrates the benefits of a rival framings framework in which analysts, rather than optimizing system operations under a single problem framing that is assumed to accurately represent the system objectives, instead interrogate multiple competing hypotheses of how complex water management problems should be formulated. Analyzing rival framings helps discovering unintended consequences that result from inherent biases of alternative problem formulations.
Yihdego, Z. 2017. The Fairness ‘Dilemma’ in Sharing the Nile Waters. What Lessons from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam for International Law? Brill.
This book enquires into the fairness issues in connection with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in light of relevant colonial-era Nile treaties, post-1990 Nile framework instruments, and international watercourses law. The GERD is now a fait accompli, but fairness considerations will continue to be vital issues during its construction, filling, and operation. This monograph argues that the GERD is a symbol of a fair share of the Nile waters by Ethiopia, the realization of which depends on, inter alia, an appropriate economic return, benefit sharing and prevention of significant impacts. Yihdego articulates the lessons that can be applied to public international law and suggests a process to address the issue of unfair agreements, arguing that, although the principle of fairness’s application can be complex, the notions of procedural fairness and distributive justice can define and delineate the principle with reference to a specific treaty regime.
Zuijdgeest A., Wehrli B. 2017. Carbon and nutrient fluxes from dams and wetlands in the Zambezi basin. Chemical Geology, 467, 1-11. doi:10.1016.chemgo.2017.07.025
Dams and reservoirs alter the riverine biogeochemistry in distinct, and often different ways. While the Barotse Plains floodplain releases particles during a flood cycle, this suspended material is effectively trapped in Kariba reservoir. Seasonal production of biomass on the floodplain binds nutrients in the form of organic matter that sustains biological productivity in downstream ecosystems. Degradation of the biomass can lead to significant greenhouse gas emissions from the floodplain. The reservoir traps particles and nutrients, but carbon burial (120·10 3 t C per year) is offset by annual emissions of methane to the atmosphere with about 3000·10 3 t C-CO 2-equivalents. Therefore, building new dams will add permanent sinks of particles and nutrients to the land-ocean aquatic continuum, while draining riparian wetlands will disrupt their functions as temporal storage systems and source of terrestrial biomass for aquatic food chains.
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