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Project

Assessing effects of small- and large-scale irrigation schemes on the Water-Energy-Food nexus in the Omo-Turkana basin, Kenya and Ethiopia.

In the Omo-Turkana basin, water availability for hydropower production and food production through irrigation are inherently linked. Various trade-offs exist among these WEF-nexus components through space and time. This PhD project will focus on the water use by irrigated agriculture in two targeted sub-basins of OTB, the lower Omo basin in Ethiopia and the Turkwel river basin in Kenya. It is linked to the EU H2020 project DAFNE (Decision Analytic Framework to explore the water-energy-food NExus), running until 2020.

This PhD project investigates the influence of irrigation schemes on the hydrology and, food production in the considered sub basins. Emphasis is on the so far unmapped small-scale, often informal, irrigation schemes. The first phase of the project will involve developing a procedure to detect and map on a routine basis both small- and large-scale irrigation schemes from time series of multi-spectral satellite images from Landsat and Sentinel. Next the water requirements and water productivity of the current and expected, small and large scale irrigation schemes will be determined by means of crop growth modelling (AquaCrop) using current and future weather data, soil and crop management practices. A field campaign will be organised for ground data collection that will be used to calibrate and validate the mapping techniques, to inform the crop growth modelling and quantify yield and effective water use. Eventually, the impact of the spatially and temporally distributed water abstraction for irrigation on downstream surface water availability will be quantified by means of hydrological models like SWAT. The findings of this project may be used to inform policy governing development of irrigated agriculture and of hydropower production in the basins. 

Date:20 Sep 2018 →  20 Sep 2022
Keywords:Remote sensing, Omo-Turkana basin, Small-scale irrigation schemes
Disciplines:Landscape architecture, Art studies and sciences, Physical geography and environmental geoscience, Communications technology, Geomatic engineering, Forestry sciences, Ecology, Environmental science and management, Other environmental sciences
Project type:PhD project