Environmental Flows Management for Improved Resilience

Summary

Over the course of time humans have built dams to store water, bridges to cross mighty rivers, and canals to divert water to farm land with little awareness about the impact these modifications have on river flows, and in turn on the health of the natural environment.

As water becomes more scarce due to growing populations and growing economies, together with the threat of climate change looming over southern Africa and the rest of the world, we learn more about the valuable goods and services healthy ecosystems provide to people, industries, and countries' development. The need to restore the natural flow of rivers to ensure the sustainability of ecosystem goods and services is critical and effective environmental flows management can help with that.

Environmental Flows Management is essentially the management of dams' outputs in order to mimic the natural flow of the river - as if there is no dam at all!

USAID Southern Africa's Resilience in the Limpopo River Basin (RESILIM) Program partnered with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Bridge, and WaterNet to train Limpopo Basin policy makers, water managers, civil society and others in Environmental Flows Management.