Abstract:
Africa has set ambitious targets for development of water resources over the coming
decades. Africa Water Vision 2025 calls for a doubling of irrigated agriculture and a
five-fold increase in water use for agriculture, industry, and hydropower. The ambitious
development targets are framed in the context of integrated water resources
management, which also seeks to simultaneously allocate sufficient water for
environmental sustainability. Over the past two decades scientists have devised a
number of practical and robust approaches to determine environmental water
requirements in rivers and wetlands based on the objectives set in water planning.
We review the most widely applied approaches to assess environmental flow
requirements and consider their application in Africa through case studies in the
transboundary Mara River basin of Kenya and Tanzania and the Great Ruaha River
basin in Tanzania.
