"No food to eat. My farm has been washed away by floods."

 

While reading the news I stumbled across devastating events that took place in Ghana, with major flooding from dam spillage destroying communities in the dark shadows of two major dams- Akosombo and Kpong. This isn't a nice welcome back to my blog, but this is the harsh reality of environmental change, but thought this next blog post should centre around dams as a national scale of water management.

Dams have played a key role in societies development in the past thousands of years (Figure 1), allowing for a permanent water source for communities to settle as they had access to a stable water supply, some flood control, irrigation for crops (Altinbilek, 2002). No longer did people rely as much on seasonal rains, as reservoirs accumulate water. Farming became a way to support a bigger community with food instead of hunting and gathering. 

Figure 1: The remains of the Sadd el Kafara dam
constructed in 2600 BC, in Cairo, Egypt.

Construction of dams has increased in recent years from around 5,000 large dams in 1949 in countries, increasing to over 45,000 large dams by 2000 in over 150 countries (Altinbilek, 2002). (Figure 2). Societal needs for water have changed, so power production through hydropower has become key for countries to develop further.

Figure 2: The increase of dams in
Ghana from 1900-1990.

Now onto the video from the beginning of this post! Ghana, along with many countries around the world are seeing failing dams due to the altered rainfall patterns leading to increased and more intensive flooding. Ghana is not the only country to be experiencing these increases in flooding, climate change is altering rainfall patterns and dams cannot cope. Studies show that dams do aid flood control, but seasonal predictable flooding- not large-scale unprecedented flooding (Boulange et al., 2021). Increased precipitation leads to higher levels of water from surface runoff as well as rainfall (Grill et al., 2019). The dams in Ghana were manually opened to prevent a catastrophic amount of flooding- although I would argue it didn't necessarily do this- as the water levels were less than half a  foot away from being over the safe operational level.

There are many economic benefits from dams, however there are negative social and environmental effects, with ecosystems and houses destroyed, and rivers regimes being altered (Altinbilek, 2002). In fact only 23% of rivers globally flow undisrupted to the sea (Grill et al., 2019).

A Ghanian resident, Brian Foekpa, expressed, "No food to eat. My farm has been washed away by the floods. As I'm talking to you, these clothes I have on me now are the only ones I have." Despite local authorities' warnings, no one predicted the damage the spillage would create for over 100 communities.

Manmade dams have an uncertain future due to climate change with no guarantees how they’ll react. Scientists are predicting that natural rivers will in fact adapt better (Altinbilek, 2002). There are many factors which will influence Africa’s climate- stay tuned for future posts!