Alamgir Khalil

Subsurface water has a substantial economic value
in drinking and irrigation water across the globe. Failure to
recognise the economic value has led to wasteful and
environmentally damaging uses of the resource. When the
groundwater resource gets depleted, groundwater
development costs increase and the aquifer’s capacity to
provide the variety of environmental services, decreases with
sinking groundwater level and diminished natural discharge.
The cost of abstracting the fresh water increases with the need
to lift groundwater from increasingly greater depths, and
hence the cost-benefit ratio of groundwater use changes over
time. The procedure of discounting adjusts for future values of
related services by accounting for time differences.
Environmental costs are rather difficult to assess and
incorporate in groundwater resources management.
Environmental damage costs refer to non-use values attached
to a healthy functioning aquatic ecosystem, while the costs to
those who use the water environment refer to the
corresponding use values. This paper highlights the aspects
relevant for decisions to groundwater management and rate of
storage depletion and its financial implications.

FOR CITATIONS: Yohannes Yihdego, Alamgir Khalil & Hilmi S. Salem. 2017. Nile River’s Basin Dispute: Perspectives of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Global Journal of HUMAN-SOCIAL SCIENCE: B Geography, Geo-Sciences, Environmental Science & Disaster Management. Volume 17, Issue 2, Version 1.0, Year 2017. Online ISSN: 2249-460x & Print ISSN: 0975-587X Publisher: Global Journals Inc. (USA)

Nile River's Basin Dispute: Perspectives of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317379283_Nile_River%27s_Basin_Dispute_Perspectives_of_the_Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam_GERD [accessed Jun 7, 2017].

ABSTRACT
Transboundary river basins are under increasing pressure due to population growth, agricultural and industrial developments, and climate change, as well as river pollution. Water scarcity is on the increase due to the increasing gap between water demands and supply. This will result in more tensions, disputes, conflicts, and deadlocks in negotiations over water distribution, length of time it takes to fill the reservoir, and allocation. Ethiopia is building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile River with a hydropower capacity of 6,000 MW. The total estimated cost of the project is US$ 4.8 Billion and will be the largest dam in Africa, which is much larger than the Aswan Dam in Egypt. Regional controversies have risen over the construction of the dam between Ethiopia and the downstream countries (Sudan and Egypt).

Transboundary river basins are under increasing pressure due to population growth, agricultural and industrial developments, and climate change, as well as river pollution. Water scarcity is on the increase due to the increasing gap between water demands and supply. This will result in more tensions, disputes, conflicts, and deadlocks in negotiations over water distribution, length of time it takes to fill the eservoir, and allocation. Ethiopia is building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile River with a hydropower capacity of 6,000 MW. The total estimated cost of the project is US$ 4.8 Billion and will be the largest dam in Africa, which is much larger than the Aswan Dam in Egypt. Regional controversies have risen over the construction of the dam between Ethiopia and the downstream countries (Sudan and Egypt). The Blue Nile River is a source of around 85% of the Nile River water. Egypt claims that GERD will reduce flow of water in the Nile River between 11 and 19 billion m3(BCM) which will affect 2 million people and will also interrupt electricity supplies 25 to 40%. The real scale of the environmental impacts of GERD, under construction upstream of the Nile River, together with the rising sea levels, due to climate change, leading to saltwater intrusion downstream, are still not clear. But for Ethiopians GERD is empowering development and contribution to their future. With the Nile, no longer Egyptian birthright, and the Nile Delta gradually disappearing into the Mediterranean sea, millions of Egypt’s people will inevitably need to look elsewhere for a livable future. The crises, therefore, necessities the adaptation of a more effective institutional arrangement, such as through Rowland-Ostrom Framework, for common pool shared water resource management and cooperative approach to address and resolve present and future problems, including on other common transboundary resources (forest, oil/gas and minerals).The need for expanding traditional integrated water resources management to better include the cultural, social and political complexity of the GERD is the key factor to reconcile the contrasting concepts of “nationalism” and “regional hydro solidarity”. Connecting Nile and Congo water system, through diverting water by digging a 600-km canal together with pumping stations and other massive infrastructure to transport water from the Congo Basin to the Nile Basin has been suggested as an alternative way of ensuring Egypt’s water security. As part of mitigation measures, Egypt needs to invest in desalinization for fresh water, water-saving drip irrigation, and come up with an Aquifer Storage Recovery (ASR) scheme, artificial recharge and scheduled water extraction, to minimize the cumulative effect of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and seawater intrusion downstream along the Mediterranean coast.

The allocation of groundwater resources has been a challenge for many years due to its unforeseen side effect and lag time issues, which are often overlooked. The full impact of groundwater utilization/abstraction takes time to realize its effect at its full. In this paper, long‐term effects and groundwater dynamics were assessed using a water balance model and a time series analysis, respectively. Undeveloped groundwater systems are commonly found in a state of equilibrium, where, on average, equal amounts of water are recharged and discharged. A water budget is a static accounting of the state of the system at a given time, often before the system is developed. Water balance analysis was carried out together with the groundwater through flow, hydrograph, and surface‐groundwater interaction analysis (base flow index) to develop a conceptual water balance model, which is a very basic representation of a complex natural aquifer system and is instrumental to constrain and build a robust numerical model that can be readily justified and updated. A noble approach was employed to assess and constrain the discharge coming out of the model area to sustain the lake level, located to the north of the study area, using the whole lake catchment and lake water balance analysis. Based on the lake water balance, there is a deficit between input and output computation, and hence there should be a groundwater input to sustain the historical lake area. The analysis showed that the model area contributes 40% of the lake catchment, and hence the portion of the groundwater inflow feeding the lake was computed. This is one of the means to constrain the discharge, which adds more confidence to the recharge estimation. This is very important because the size of a sustainable groundwater development usually depends on how much of the discharge from the system can be captured by the development. Capture is independent of the recharge. Instead, it depends on the dynamic response of the aquifer system to the development. The idea that knowing the recharge is important in determining the size of a sustainable groundwater development is a myth and has no basis. The important entity in determining how a groundwater system reaches a new equilibrium is capture. How capture occurs in an aquifer system is a dynamic process. Following this study, lake water balance assessment was indirectly considered as prior information for the numerical model calibration of the discharge from the model area using a conductance parameter. Conductance is a key parameter to estimate the discharge volume together with the change in the simulated hydraulic head between time steps. The water balance error highlights which one is more sensitive, and this could help to assist in planning for future data collection/field work and where to invest the money. The water balance computation helps to figure out the degree of surface‐groundwater interaction, uncertainty, sensitive parameter, helps in the decision to invest time and money, and operates as a cross check with other analytical or numerical modelling.