Balancing ecosystem services with energy and food security - assessing trade-offs for reservoir operation and irrigation investment in Kenya's Tana basin

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Balancing ecosystem services with energy and food security - assessing trade-offs for reservoir operation and irrigation investment in Kenya's Tana basin

Hurford, AP; Harou, JJ; (2014) Balancing ecosystem services with energy and food security - assessing trade-offs for reservoir operation and irrigation investment in Kenya's Tana basin. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences , 11 (1) 1343 - 1388. 10.5194/hessd-11-1343-2014. Green open access

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Abstract

Competition for water between key economic sectors and the environment means agreeing on allocation is challenging. Managing releases from the three major dams in Kenya’s Tana River basin with its 4.4 million inhabitants, 567MW of installed hydropower capacity, 33 000 ha of irrigation and ecologically important wetlands and forests is a pertinent example. This research seeks to identify and help decision-makers visualise reservoir management strategies which result in the best possible (Paretooptimal) allocation of benefits between sectors. Secondly we seek to show how tradeoffs between achievable benefits shift with the implementation of new proposed rice, cotton and biofuel irrigation projects. To identify the Pareto-optimal trade-offs we link a water resources management model to a multi-criteria search algorithm. The decisions or “levers” of the management problem are volume dependent release rules for the three major dams and extent of investment in new irrigation schemes. These decisions are optimised for objectives covering provision of water supply and irrigation, energy generation and maintenance of ecosystem services which underpin tourism and local livelihoods. Visual analytic plots allow decision makers to assess multi-reservoir rulesets by understanding their impacts on different beneficiaries. Results quantify how economic gains from proposed irrigation schemes trade-off against disturbance of the flow regime which supports ecosystem services. Full implementation of the proposed schemes is shown to be Pareto-optimal, but at high environmental and social cost. The clarity and comprehensiveness of “best-case” trade-off analysis is a useful vantage point from which to tackle the interdependence and complexity of water-energy-food “nexus” challenges.

Type:	Article
Title:	Balancing ecosystem services with energy and food security - assessing trade-offs for reservoir operation and irrigation investment in Kenya's Tana basin
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.5194/hessd-11-1343-2014
Publisher version:	http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/hessd-11-1343-2014
Language:	English
Additional information:	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Civil, Environ and Geomatic Eng
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1431872