Water & Environmental Change in Africa

Welcome to my final post! We've been looking at water and development, the ways in which it is managed, and some potential issues which may occur in the future. I have been hinting at environmental change... and finally, we're going to discuss it now. Firstly, what is environmental change ? : anthropogenic and natural processes leading to physical changes in the environment as well as in the climate, which leads to increased variability in  surface water,  rainfall and soil moisture ( Taylor et al., 2013 ). Ways in which Ghana's climate may change include: Changes in annual rainfall, as well as changes to the temporal and spatial pattern of rainfall ( Carter and Parker, 2009 ) (Figure 1). This can be from phenomenon such as as El Ni ñ o-Southern Oscillation and La Ni ñ a - which can effect global temperatures and precipitation due to the changes in trade winds effecting moisture being transferred within the atmosphere. Seasons may change, in terms of length, start da...

Welcome back guys! We briefly touched on groundwater in the past blogs, but it definitely deserves its own post due to its significance within water management. It has the potential of being a sustainable source of water, able to withstand environmental change where other sources may wither. Groundwater is the largest store of unfrozen water on this planet, lots of aquifers are comprised of ancient stores of water which has been collecting for thousands of years. African countries are not the only regions of the world which use groundwater as a main source of fresh water- half the global population rely on groundwater for potable wate r . What is the issue with groundwater?  It is "out of site and all too often out of mind" ( Gaye and Tindimugaya, 2019 ). For this reason, groundwater has been excluded from most water scarcity metrics, only including above ground water as an accessible of safe water as it can be quantifiably measured ( Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017 ). The recharg...