Assessing Groundwater Beneath Africa

Alan MacDonald and colleagues published their map of African groundwater resources in Environmental Research Letters three years ago; since then there’s been much progress, including the commencement of the UPGro programme

Back in 2012, Alan MacDonald’s paper in Environmental Research Letters (ERL) revealed that there’s a lot more water beneath the African continent than most people suspected."Quantitative maps of groundwater resources in Africa" is one of the open-access journal’s most highly downloaded papers, clocking up more than 83,000 downloads and 49 citations to date. The article hit the headlines worldwide, bringing the British Geological Survey researcher and his colleagues to the BBC News website, The Telegraph, AlJazeera, Mail Online, Huff Post, Reuters, Yahoo! News, Spiegel Online, Welt Online, Elmundo.es, Le Monde, and more.

More than three years later, we caught up with MacDonald to find out the impact of this publicity and where the paper has led.

"When the press release went out I was working on a glacier in Iceland," he told environmentalresearchweb, "so it was quite a challenge to get [mobile] reception to do lots of media interviews. But I was manfully helped by all my co-authors at the time. It was slightly surreal having such media attention when I was in a remote place far away from African groundwater."

Immediately after publication, MacDonald found his time went to interviews and enquiries from radio and newspapers; in the following five or six months he became more involved in writing, and contributing to, opinion pieces.

Building awareness

So what effect did all this communications work have on policy makers and the wider public? For a start, John Beddington, then UK government chief scientific advisor, contacted MacDonald, and the article was widely quoted by governments around the world.

"It’s hard to pin down individual changes in a country’s policy, but I think the paper and the media interest surrounding it did get some of the messages about groundwater further up the chain within governments and in UN agencies," said MacDonald. "So there are a lot more people and even government ministers in various countries who are more aware of the groundwater available within their country, and have begun to think about how that can be used."

Using groundwater for irrigation across Africa is of interest because of concerns about food security. Although his ERL study revealed that there are sufficient volumes of groundwater across much of Africa that could be used for rural water supply, MacDonald believes that high-demand uses like agriculture using groundwater "could be problematic in a lot of areas and would need to be accompanied by more research and monitoring."

Research flow

Perhaps the most direct follow-on from the African study was a similar project in South Asia. MacDonald and his team have just spent three years analysing the extent of groundwater resources across the Indo-Gangetic plain; they hope to submit a paper on their results by Christmas. "The proposal was in motion before all the media interest, but the media attention certainly helped speed things through," he explained.

Back in Africa, the original study area, the team is now part of a large four-year research programme dubbed UPGro (Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor). "That certainly coincided with and was helped by the media interest in our paper," said MacDonald. "It was much easier for the donors and the funders to earmark money for groundwater research."

MacDonald is involved in two strands of the programme. In the first, Hidden Crisis, he’s investigating why around 30–40% of the hand pumps in Africa fail, even though there’s groundwater available. Funding for this project got the go-ahead in May; MacDonald has just returned from Ethiopia for the first meeting with the 20 project partners.

The failures may be due to physical or hydrogeological factors, how the community manages the water point or engineering problems, so the team will take a multidisciplinary approach. "[It] might be that the water point has been abandoned because the groundwater has poor quality, or the materials used in the handpump have become very corroded and leave lots of iron in the water," said MacDonald. "Or it could be that there are no spare parts for the hand pumps that fail so they won’t be fixed." In some areas too little water comes out of the ground, perhaps because boreholes have been drilled where the ground’s not permeable enough. "If [the handpumps] had been sited slightly better in the village, they might have intersected more groundwater and been more reliable," said MacDonald. To find out more, the researchers will study a total of roughly 600 waterpoints in Malawi, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Source: Environmental Research

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• Research
• Groundwater
• Environment