TAWIRI conference discussions continued: Ruaha River

Wetlands, like Silale Swamp in Tarangire, are vital for feeding rivers

Returning to the TAWIRI conference back in December that I posted a bit about already, the other talk that set me thinking about economics of conservation was a fascinating talk by Eric Wolanski about ecohydrology. About what, I hear you ask?! Ecohydrology, the study of the interactions between water (hydrology) and ecosystems. Now it occurred to me that we've not done a post specifically about wetlands yet, which is a bit of a major ommission, given their importance in savannah ecosystems. We'll have to rectify that in time, but for now we're going to plunge straight into some important stuff.

Flows in the Mara River have been disrupted by deforestation in the Mau Forest

As we all know, the life-blood of a savannah ecosystem is its permanent water source(s). As we've talked about in our Serengeti Story, the Mara River is the only important permanent water source in the Serengeti Mara ecosystem, and the animals move a long way to get there. Tarangire has the Tarangire River. Ruaha has the Great Ruaha River, etc. What makes these rivers permanent and other rivers in the savannah only seasonal is that they're fed by sources that capture the rain in the wet season and slowly release it during the dry season, whilst sand rivers tend to just be rain fed. The Mara is fed by the Mau Forest in Kenya, Tarangire River by Silale Swamp, and the Great Ruaha by a series of wetlands, including those of the Usangu Flats. Meddle with these 'sponges' and you can get in all sorts of trouble with your permanent water sources.

Birds and other wildlife also love wetlands like Silale! Sep 2011

Eric told a fairly simple story, but a fascinating one none the less (especially when you start doing the sums that I've been looking at). If you have vegetation covering a waterbody, he said, the water loss through evaporation and transpiration (plant breathing) is about 50% of the evaporation you have from open water. Somore water flows from vegetated wetlands into rivers than from ones taht have lost their vegetation through excessive grazing. Which is exactly what had happened during the 1990s and 2000s on the Usangu flats, above Ruaha. Much of the water that flows from Usangu at the end of the wet season is the water that subsequently fills Mtera Dam, so keeping the water flowing - as well as providing a vital resource for the wildlife of Ruaha National Park - is pretty important for electricity generation in Tanzania! Uncontrolled (but illegal) immigration had allowed hundreds of people with an estimated 300,000 cattle to occupy the Usangu Game Reserve (as it was), and the cattle ate all the vegetation over the wetland. As a consequence the evaporation rates increased and less water flowed from Usangu into the Great Ruaha. In 2006 the government decided to evict these people and incorporate the Usangu Game Reserve into Ruaha National Park (in so doing creating the largest National Park in Africa), hoping to restore water flows, though among serious concerns about human rights. And Eric was able to watch the consequences in the flow rates through the Usangu flats and into the Great Ruaha river. Amazingly, this operation alone has resulted in the Ruaha river flowing for an extra month. Now that result is a great success for conservation, but it's not the end of the story by any means and I did some quick back of an envelope calculations of my own that are pretty staggering, but before we go there let me post a few caveats - firstly, I'm not a hydrologist and I'm just reading a few things quickly, I'm not guaranteeing these figures in any way. Also, as I've not always found the exact figures I've tended to err on the side of caution - for example, I've found statements that show dry season flow is unimportant to Mtera water levels (as you'd imagine), but that the dam mostly fills when the Usangu wetlands are flowing full rate at the end of the wet season, but I've not got the relative figures for this so I've assumed that the flow operates continuously - which should underestimate the importance of Usangu. Still, here are some interesting numbers...

Early in 2011 the IMF downgraded it's forecasts for growth in the Tanzanian economy from 7.5% to 6%, due to the costs imposed by TANESCO power cuts (up to 16hrs per day in much of the country!). Tanzanian GDP in 2010 was abour $23 Billion, so the cost to Tanzania of the powercuts, according to the IMF, is $345M. [Interestingly, that GDP is a tiny bit more than George Soros and family have tucked away, is similarly a tiny bit more than the value of the treasure recently discovered in the vaults of an Indian temple and is not even half the annual turnover of GlaxoSmithKlein!] Most of these power cuts were caused by low water levels in dams preventing power generation - Mtera dam (fed by Usangu through the Great Ruaha) feeds two power stations, Mtera and Kidatu, producing between then 284MW of power, which is about 40% of Tanzania's total capacity of 769MW (Thanks TANESCO for these figures). I've not found how many months the stations were going for, but I did discover that for the last few years the Ruaha has flowed for only 9 months, so let's assume it's similar. Now if we assume that 40% of the cost of the blackouts is caused by Mtera not producing (actually, I'm sure it's much higher since it's mainly the Hydro part of the production that's failing, but that's the proportion of overall capacity sourced by Mtera and will give a conservative estimate), those thee months of non-flow each cost the Tanzanian economy $46M. So the government's action to remove cattle, by providing an extra month's flow from Usangu, might well ahve saved about $46M per year. Not a bad investment, I think, even if they had paid the going rate of $150 per cattle the $45M required would have been paid off in one year and as it was many of these cattle moved elsewhere where they caused less damage to sensitive wetland habitats.

Now the final question you'll be asking, I guess, is what about the remaining 3 months of no-flow? How can we get that back? Well Eric and colleagues estimated that if the rice farms that are the other major water user returned only 25% of their water, there's be no problem at all. And I've just done a quick check and found that the estimated cost of completely closing the rice farming industry in this area would cost the national economy 'only' $15.9M per year. If that's what it takes to keep Mtera flowing, it doesn't seem a particularly hard decision for me, and think of the wildlife benefits too!

Anyway, I hope those figures are of some interest - it just goes to show that conservation really can be a 'win, win' option, even when hard decisions need to be made. Let's just hope it doesn't take too long before someone sees sense here - good luck to those people and organisations trying to build awareness of these issues!