Tekleab Shibru Associate Professor of Geomatics, Chicago State University

Feb 29, 2020

In economics, “Free-Lunch” depicts a condition where goods and services are attained without any cost an individual. Normally, such investment or condition is none-existent and often the situation come to being when someone else is carrying the cost. It could also be that expenses are obscured or not clearly understood. Out of the total water budget of the Nile watershed, i.e., 84 billion cubic meters of water, Egypt uses 65.5 billion cubic meters of water, which is 78% of the watershed’s water resources. The Ethiopian highlands, also known as the water tower for the amount of precipitation traps from the prevailing airmass, generates approximately 85% this water resources. And yet Egypt, while having such monopoly over the watershed’s water use, has not contributed a dime for its management. It has been Ethiopia’s duty hitherto è FREE LUNCH AT BEST!!

Watershed management is a useful operation carried out on a geographical area that is contributing water to a river. It is to sustain and enhance a watershed’s both hydrological as well as ecological functions. Hydrologically, watershed provides critical functions of collecting precipitations, soaking or storing some fractions, while releasing excess water to a river in the form of runoff. It also has important ecological function in terms of communities of human, plants, animals and other biogeochemical interactions it supports. Well managed watershed delivers improved supply of quality and quantity water, and reduced frequency and unpredictability of flood events. It also enhances a more evenly distributed flow through the year, improved base flow and warranted river with lesser load of sediments and other chemicals and healthy ecosystem.

Watershed management is therefore a costly operation too. In United States, billions of dollars are spent on watershed managements of their major rivers. For instances, the state of Colorado alone, deploys various expensive best management practices to manage the rock mountains and plateaus. These landscapes are the starting point of Colorado River, and geomorphological structures through which the river flows, respectively. Colorado River flows in 6 southwestern states for 2,330 km before emptying in Gulf of California.  According to the Getches-Wilkinson center of Natural resources and environment, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado state is deploying more than 520 basin implementation projects to manage the watershed. The management projects, which aims at ensuring statewide quality water supply is at a cost of estimated $20 billion.

Similarly, in Ethiopian part of Upper Nile Basin, an integrated watershed management is practiced to sustain land’s agricultural productivity (See Figure 1). As part of this management, costly Soil and water conservation, is widely practices. For instances, Professor Hurni, a founding president of the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern, Switzerland’s, estimated that 3.5 million hectares of agricultural lands on Ethiopian highland has been treated by various types of soils and water conservation practices. However, this is only 18% of the cropland needing such treatment and some 12 million hectares of croplands still need similar treatment. A cost associated the soil and water conservation is approximated by a study conducted on Gedeb watershed in Upper Nile Basin, which covers around 100,000 hectares. The approximation, which is based on a labor cost of $0.80 USD per day revealed that conservation treatments on average cost $54 USD for a hectare of land and $5.4 million for the watershed.