In the Pangani Basin (Tanzania) the overallocation of water is making the availability of water worse. The 3.4 million people living in the area are vulnerable to the projected drying of the climate.
Adapting to the Drying
Efforts are underway to implement ‘environmental flows’, an ecosystem-based method for allocating water to different uses within sustainable limits. The environmental flows approach is based on negotiations among different stakeholders. Implementation entails developing and coordinating decision-making over water allocation from local to basin scales. Ideally, authorities enlist representatives of competing water users – farmers, hydropower, fishers, residents and ecosystems alike – to help decide how to allocate water.
Informed Decision-Making
Combining a local sense of who needs what, when and where with scientific data on how much water is available now and might be available under climate change scenarios, the collaborators are piloting a new, and flexible, approach to informed decision-making. They are learning to allocate water within the limits of the river’s flow, including to ecosystems in the basin that store water, regulate flows and support livelihoods. Allocation of water to sustain natural infrastructure, such as wetlands and estuary habitats, and adaptive governance, provide capacity to deal with uncertain future events. Through the support of WANI and others, better water governance and best practices will reduce pressure on ecosystems and start to make communities and the economy in the Pangani less vulnerable to climate change in the future.