Features Community-Based Natural Resource Management (Asia) Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is now part of the Rural Poverty and Environment Program Initiative. Ecosystems and Human Health Program Ecohealth supports research in developing countries to solve human health problems rooted in ecosystem conditions. EEPSEA: Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia The Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) supports training and research in environmental and resource economics in the region. Urban Poverty and Environment Program   WATER / Appendix: Sources and Resources WATER / Part 2. The Approaches Field research is examined in three approaches to local water management: small-scale water supply; wastewater treatment and reuse; and watershed management and irrigation.

Part Two of Water: Local-level Management surveys three approaches to local water management supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC): small-scale water supply; wastewater treatment and reuse; and watershed management and irrigation. The following resources are provided to complement this chapter.

Small-scale Water Supply

Fog catchers

Fog catchers are fine-mesh, polypropylene nets used to transform windborne mists into water. IDRC-supported research dating back to the mid-1980s shows they can supply small volumes of potable water where alternatives are inaccessible or unaffordable. Yet for all their technical elegance, fog catchers have not succeeded as well in practice. Now, research on fog collection is taking new and unexpected directions. In Sweden, Israel, and Tanzania, researchers are experimenting with harvesting dew — taking the moisture from the night winds that blow across even the driest deserts.

Clouds on Tap: Harvesting Fog Around the World
(October 1998) Six years ago, fog collectors were used for the first time to supplement the water supply of Chungungo, a remote Chilean village. This simple technology has more than doubled the amount of water available in Chungungo, while inspiring similar efforts in other communities around the world.

Technology File: Tapping Into Fog
The frugal use of expensive water trucked in from distant wells was once a way of life in the parched desert village of Chungungo, Chile — located in one of the driest parts of the world. With IDRC funding, Chilean and Canadian scientists fashioned an inexpensive, sustainable water supply system by stretching polypropylene mesh between two posts — like an oversized volleyball net.

Rooftop water harvesting

Rooftop water harvesting has been practiced for centuries in arid and semi-arid zones, but is also a familiar approach in monsoon climates of seasonal downpours and on islands where fresh water is never plentiful. The main challenges concern keeping the collected water clean and engineering cost-effective storage.

Catching Rooftop Rainwater in Gaza
(November 1998) A roof is not just a means to keep rain off our heads. It can also be used to bolster drinking water supplies. With funding from IDRC, scientists from Canada and Palestine tested 11 rooftop catchment systems in the Gaza Strip — an area plagued by water shortages because of arid conditions, ground water pollution, and political instability. The project looked at their technical and economic efficiency, as well as the social acceptability of rooftop water.

Field water harvesting

Diverting and gathering scarce rainwater — for household gardens, watering stock, and drinking water — have busied communities for thousands of years. It works best where there is not enough rain to support agriculture without intervention, but enough rain to produce crops at least in occasional years.

Combating desertification: Rainwater harvesting in Jordan
(May 1997) On a windy morning, the dust of Muwaggar, near Amman, turns the world into a uniform beige, hiding the sun and covering the stunted cypress trees at the University of Jordan's experimental farm with a thick layer of sand. The Muwaggar watershed, which measures 5 kilometres (km) wide by 15 km long, is typical of other arid and semi-arid areas in Jordan and neighbouring countries, where the average rainfall is less than 200 millimetres per year.

Aquifer Protection and Recharge

From the Sahel to Latin America to Indonesia, aquifers are suffering the desperate effects of bad management (or no managementl). In many regions, freshwater supplies from aquifers have declined catastrophically; some have completely stopped, at least in the dry seasons. The quality of aquifers has also been degraded, either by salinization or by infiltration of fertilizers, chemical wastes, and other contaminants.

Sao Paulo's Troubled Waters
(April 1994) In Sao Paulo, South America's largest city and the continent's industrial centre, the price of industrialization can be seen in the murky, contaminated waters of the Tiete and Pinheiros Rivers that cross the sprawling megalopolis. What is not so clear is the effect that these rivers — choked with sewage and industrial waste — have on the groundwater supply, to which they are connected by a shallow aquifer.

The University of Costa Rica's Masters Program in Water Resource Management and Hydrogeology
(January 1998) Last August, some 50 high-ranking government ministers, vice ministers, and institute directors met in Managua, Nicaragua to consider the future of the city's water supply. According to Managua's master water supply plan, dependence on an aquifer located right below the city should be reduced. The plan claims that the aquifer has been pumped too hard in recent decades and can not supply Managua's growing population much longer. But the news they heard that day challenged the plan. In a detailed presentation, a graduate student working with the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources argued that the Managua aquifer still has plenty of water left.

Laying a Foundation for Joint Management of the Israeli-Palestinian Mountain Aquifer
(September 1998) Since 1993, Israelis and Palestinians from a range of disciplines have been developing a plan for joint management of the Mountain Aquifer, which provides about 50% of Israel's drinking water.

Management of Shared Groundwater Resources: The Israeli–Palestinian Case with an International Perspective
(edited by Eran Feitelson and Marwan Haddad; IDRC/Kluwer Academic 2001)
For their supply of freshwater, both Palestinians and Israelis rely heavily on underground aquifers beneath Israel and the Palestinians territories. These aquifers are at the heart of ongoing negotiations between Palestine and Israel, as water is often considered a major obstacle to peace. This book presents a framework for the joint management of shared aquifers, with specific reference and proposals for the major Israeli–Palestinian case: the Mountain Aquifer. It is the first book to explicitly address the issue of cross-border groundwater management, an issue that is increasingly becoming a focal point of discussions at both the international and cross-jurisdictional levels.

Miscellaneous Technologies

Technology File: Portable Water-Testing Kit
Safe drinking water is essential to good health, but conventional methods of water testing have depended on sophisticated laboratories and highly trained technicians largely unavailable in developing countries and remote communities in Canada. IDRC has funded research in Asia, Africa and Latin America to evaluate existing water tests for their accuracy, simplicity, and cost. The results speak for themselves.
(see also: Testing the Waters)

Detecting the Presence of Waterborne Chemicals: Alternative Water Tests for the South
(December 1997) Dampen a piece of absorbent paper with a sample of untreated water. Place some buttercrunch lettuce seeds on the paper. Incubate them at room temperature for four to five days. Compare the length of the emerging seedlings or roots to those of seeds grown under normal conditions with potable water that is not chemically contaminated.

Technology File: The PVC Handpump
Groundwater — cleansed by the soil's natural filters — is the best water in many parts of the world. But in developing countries, the technology used to get water out of the ground has not always been reliable. For years, handpumps in rural areas broke down because they were not suited to rugged conditions and heavy use. They were often left in disrepair when spare parts were hard to obtain. Today, 13 developing nations and thousands of people are benefiting from a better handpump designed with IDRC support.

Technology File: Solar-powered Desalinators to Provide Drinking Water in Arid Areas
Providing potable water is a major problem in many areas across Africa. Years of drought in desert regions have meant that surface water and shallow wells are not being replenished by rainfall. Climate changes in these fragile ecosystems can affect the survival of entire groups of people. In Botswana, 80% of the population depend on boreholes for water. However, drilling for water is expensive and often disappointing. More than half the boreholes in some areas of Botswana result in scarce or salty water. Some communities depend on water that is delivered by truck — an expensive and often unreliable system.

Technology File: Water Disinfection Using Solar Radiation
Drawing inspiration from water treatment practices developed in India as long ago as 2000 B.C., researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon developed, with IDRC support, a low-cost, practical means to provide safe drinking water in rural and urban areas in developing countries. The key to this method lies in the ability of direct sunlight to destroy bacteria. The treated water is suitable for drinking, and can also be used to prepare Oral Rehydration Therapy solutions to treat dehydration suffered by children with diarrhea.

Water Without Arsenic
(July 1993) The altiplano plateau of northeastern Chile is a sparsely populated, desolate area. What little water can be found contains high levels of arsenic, a poisonous element that leaches out of the plateau's volcanic soils. With no water treatment plants serving the region, local residents drink water containing levels of arsenic up to 200 times higher than the maximum recommended by international guidelines. But in some quarters, arsenic exposure is decreasing. As a result of a project funded by IDRC, school children there are now drinking safer water that has more acceptable levels of the element.

Wastewater Treatment and Reuse

An old response to water shortage is to recycle dirty water after it is used. That can mean reusing treated “gray water” after bathing, laundering, and cooking; it can also extend, with much more care, to reuse of “black water” from toilets. In some places, recycling wastewater carries the approval of local tradition. Elsewhere, it has become a new and pressing necessity.

Wastewater Use in Irrigated Agriculture: Confronting the Livelihood and Environmental Issues
(edited by Christopher Scott, Naser I. Faruqui, and Liqa Raschid; CABI/IDRC/IWMI 2004)
This book critically reviews experience worldwide in the use of wastewater for agriculture through a series of peer-reviewed papers defining and elaborating on the issues at the centre of the debate around wastewater use in agriculture. Particular emphasis is placed on untreated wastewater use by means of field-based case studies from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America that address the environmental and health impacts and risks.

Regenerative Solutions for Managing Community-generated Organic Waste
(February 2000) Gregory Rose is searching for a silver lining in one of the world's most pressing environmental and public health problems: what to do with the increasing amounts of human waste, also known as 'black water'. Over the past 50 years, the volume of domestic sewage produced globally has more than doubled. Much of that sewage is generated in the rapidly urbanizing areas of the South, creating the same kind of public health crisis for developing countries that led to the so-called 'sanitary reforms' in 18th century Europe.

CFP Report 27: Community-Based Technologies for Domestic Wastewater Treatment and Reuse: Options for Urban Agriculture
(Gregory D. Rose; Spring 1999)
The under-management of domestic wastewater in many southern urban areas presents a major challenge. The accumulation of human bio-waste is constant and unmanaged wastewater directly contributes to the contamination of locally available fresh water. The cumulative results of unmanaged wastewater can have broad degenerative effects on both public and ecosystem health. Urban waste management can and must be transformed from a disposal-based linear system to a recovery-based closed-loop system that promotes the conservation of water and nutrient resources and contributes to public health.

Wastewater Treatment and Reuse for Food and Water Security
(Naser I. Faruqui, April 2000)
This brief discusses wastewater treatment and reuse as a tool for addressing food and water security in the Middle East and North Africa.

Watershed Management and Irrigation

Surface water management

IDRC-supported research in surface water has concentrated primarily on the arid and semi-arid regions — where water is the limiting factor on development, and where gains in income and quality of life depend critically on achieving irrigation efficiencies. In many of these areas, water gets multiple uses, meeting a variety of agricultural and household needs.

Seeking sustainability in rural Egypt: Linking scientific and indigenous knowledge
(March 1997) On Egypt's dry north-west coast, everything depends on rain. For 300,000 indigenous Bedouin, whose ancestors have lived in the area since the 17th century, rainfall levels dictate how much barley to plant, where the sheep and goats will graze even the timing of weddings, which occur more often in good rainfall years. The area's water resources are not only scarce, but also extremely variable. In response, the Bedouin have developed an intricate web of strategies for managing their water resources.

Promoting Local Water Management in Nepal
(January 1998) In the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, the land of the world's tallest mountains, smaller may be better. At least, that's what two engineers believe when it comes to water management. "We've got to get rid of the fixation in our part of the world that water means projects, and projects means large projects," says Dipak Gyawali of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF). Gyawali and his partner, Ajaya Dixit, see themselves as myth-busters with a mission: to convince the government to examine all of the options for wise water management before embarking on costly high risk, large projects.

Promoting Sustainable Agriculture in China's Tarim Basin
(March 2000) The Tarim Basin of northwestern China is Eurasia's driest spot. Despite its harsh climate, local farmers produce one-sixth of China's cotton, as well as grains, fruits, silk, and wool. While farming has traditionally been centred on the region's oases, water diversion and irrigation initiatives have allowed the expansion of agriculture. However, according to an ongoing IDRC-funded study, unsustainable water use and inappropriate farming practices have contributed to deforestation, soil alkalinity, and decreasing agricultural productivity in the basin.

Water Management: An Uphill Battle in the Andes
(May 2000) The water coming into our village is totally contaminated... And there is practically no water during the dry season, said the farmer from Mascarilla, Ecuador. This problem affects thousands of farmers in the El Angel river basin, who rely on an irrigation network developed over hundreds of years. In late 1995, researchers in the regoin established the Consorcio Carchi as a forum for ordinary citizens, NGOs, national and foreign universities, international research institutions, and government agencies to jointly manage the irrigation network.

Forecasting Water Flows in Pakistan's Indus River
(May 2001) A Pakistan-Canada research partnership has led to the launch of a sophisticated forecasting system that promises to help Pakistani authorities accurately estimate how much water flows into the Indus River — the lifeline of one of the largest irrigation networks in the world. The water forecasting system could ultimately help Pakistan to optimize water allocation at a national level by deciding how much water is used for irrigation, industry, and domestic purposes.

Tapping into Community Resources in China
(June 2001) In remote highland villages in Guizhou — one of China's poorest provinces — villagers have solved a problem that had existed for 200 years. Working with researchers from the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, with support from IDRC, they have secured a steady supply of water. They have also reforested land, transformed a wasteland into a peach orchard, and undertaken other productive initiatives by applying community-based natural resource management.

Subsurface water management

Men and women have been drawing water from below ground since Biblical times and before. For most of those centuries, wells were limited to the depth of hand-dug holes (few deeper than 10 metres), or those drilled (to a few tens of metres) by human or animal power. Modern technology permits much deeper drilling — and can lead to catastrophic depletion of water resources. So new management approaches are needed.

Divining Jordan's desert waters
(January 2002) Researchers have discovered a system of shallow aquifers just below the surface of Jordan's badia that may provide a vital source of water for the semi-nomadic people who live there. What accounts for the unlikely presence of water a short distance below the surface of the desert? Mostly a quirk of the local geology.

Conjunctive water management

Many communities around the world survive by exploiting both surface and subsurface water supplies — the conjunctive use that often alternates with the rhythms of seasonal rainfalls. Typically, households and farms draw water from below ground to prolong crop growth after the rainy season ends, but in some regions surface water is itself the temporary supplement to year-round groundwater and aquifers.

Technology File: Improving Water Resources: the Deccan Trap in India
In the Akole Taluka tribal area of central India, people once spent much of each day fetching water for household use. Today, life in this region — where poverty, disease, low agricultural productivity, and poor morale were once common — has been transformed. Some communities here now have water virtually year-round, with enough left over to irrigate crops on once-unproductive land. This dramatic turnaround is due in large part to a new water management strategy — developed with IDRC support — that employs a variety of techniques to make the most of surface and groundwater resources.

Improving Access to Water on India's Deccan Trap Plateau
(March 1998) Life in the Akole Taluka tribal area of central India had long been marked by hardship and deprivation, exacerbated by a lack of water. In the dry season from February to May, women and children spent most of each day collecting water for domestic use, venturing farther from their villages as available water dwindled. Though challenges remain, the mood in Akole Taluka is considerably brighter now thanks to a new water management strategy developed with support from IDRC.

Collecting Fog on El Tofo 2003-05-02
In the early 1990s, the global news media became entranced by a small town in northern Chile that was using a new and innovative technology to draw much-needed water from fog. The technology worked well and the increased water supply helped to transform the town. But, more than 10 years later, the mesh nets of the fog catchers are in a state of total disrepair. What caused the community to abandon the project that had brought it abundant water and high hopes for the future? And what can be learned from the El Tofo experience?