[0:00:03] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water resources podcast. I'm Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with the leading experts, including topics on extreme climate events, over exploitation and potential solutions towards more sustainable management. I'm delighted to welcome Jude Cobbing to the podcast today. Jude is currently an advisor on integrated water resources management at Save The Children, which is about 100 year old charity organization. Jude would you like to describe a little bit about your background related to water resources?
[0:00:44] Jude Cobbing: Yes, sure. Thank you very much Bridget and it's really lovely to be on your podcast and and hello to all of your listeners. So I'm, as you say, I work for Save The Children at present here in Washington DC in the United States. But I'm a groundwater scientist by background, a hydrogeologist and I studied hydrogeology in the UK and worked for the British Geological Survey for five years, followed by more than 10 years back in southern Africa in a variety of roles there for the public sector, the private sector and working in mining and engineering and rural water supply as well, which is one of my first interests and I've been in the States since 2015. I did some work for the World Bank working on African water resources, particularly groundwater availability and some of the applications of groundwater to questions of economic growth and development and food security in Africa. And to bring us right up to date, I've been with Save the Children for the last 2.5 years, working as an advisor on a whole range of USAID funded development projects.
[0:01:57] Bridget Scanlon: Thank you so much, Jude for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And one of the things that got me interested about interviewing Jude was his article entitled Waking a Sleeping Giant, realizing the potential of groundwater in Sub Saharan Africa. And today, I hope we will cover a number of different issues including the role of groundwater in poverty alleviation, importance in irrigated agriculture and the reasons why groundwater has not been developed that much in Sub Saharan Africa and how we can develop solutions to enhance groundwater development to improve food security, water security, and increased climate resilience there. So that's quite a slew of things that I hope we can cover today, Jude. So maybe first start with what motivated you to write the article titled Waking the Sleeping Giant and also your more recent paper on groundwater and the discourse of shortage in Sub Saharan Africa.
[0:03:00] Jude Cobbing: Yes, thanks Bridget. So those two publications really came out of work that I was doing at the World Bank as a groundwater advisor. And we were looking closely at groundwater availability in Africa, south of the Sahara mainly and its applications for things like irrigation and food security. And I became increasingly a little concerned by the, it seemed to me there were a lot of articles out there talking about a global groundwater shortage and a global groundwater crisis. And it seemed to me that they drew mainly from countries in the northern hemisphere, in the United States and South Asia, in China where there are very legitimate problems of groundwater overdraft. However, across most of Africa, we use very little of the groundwater resource at the moment. And my concern was that this discourse, global shortage was being applied to Africa and was actually having the unintended effect of stalling investment and interest in groundwater and farmer led groundwater irrigation. And I saw that as a serious problem and that was the motivation for the articles.
[0:04:14] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, I really enjoyed those articles, Jude. And I thought it was very refreshing to hear that viewpoint because we don't hear it very often these days. And most of the emphasis is on shortage and scarcity and things like that. And I think that aspect was also emphasized in the recent World Bank report, The Hidden Wealth of Nations and the role of groundwater indicating that groundwater was being underutilized in Sub Saharan Africa. So after talking with you recently, you got me to thinking about looking at poverty and and the role of groundwater in alleviating poverty. So I was looking at the multidimensional poverty index that's developed by the UN and Oxford. And they consider living standards, education and health when they developed this indicator. And we know that water cross cuts a lot of those themes, living standards with their water security and also health in terms of nutrition and food security and then education. I think in people having to walk long distances to get water and and not being able to go to school and things like that. So what I found interesting about their statistics was they looked at about 110 countries globally. That's 6.1 out of 8 billion people. And they said 1.1 billion of those 6.1 was considered acutely multi dimensionally poor, that's 18% of their population that they looked at and half of those poor people live in Sub Saharan Africa. So that's a huge issue. And because you work for save the Children, 50% are children, not because you work for Save the Children. But that's an interesting statistic also. But the other aspect that I gleaned from our conversation recently was you said that water resources and irrigation play a very big role in getting countries out of poverty. And they mentioned that 25 of the 41 countries halved their multidimensional poverty index within the past 15 years, including China and India. And so because we mostly focus on overexploitation and water scarcity and things, we tend to ignore the benefits of water development and how it can improve society. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about that, Jude.
[0:06:40] Jude Cobbing: Yes. Sure. Thank you very much. I think you put your finger on it. There is, there is a crisis in Africa and it is a crisis of underdevelopment and of poverty. And you've mentioned the multidimensional poverty index. We know that poverty at the moment is an immensely serious problem in many African countries. According to World Bank data by 2050 we think that around nine out of 10 of the world's poorest people will live in Africa. So the crisis, as I see it is very much one of poverty and underdevelopment and lack of access to resources and irrigation and groundwater have a huge role to play there in making agriculture more productive and in making agriculture climate resilient. It's with one or two exceptions, nearly every single country in Africa is using only a small fraction of its renewable groundwater resource less than 5% with, as I say, it is a couple of exceptions and one of them is South Africa. We can talk about that a bit later on, but essentially we have a continent that desperately needs to use more of its water for irrigation, for food security, for climate resilience, for economic development and growth and for lifting people and particularly children, as you say, out of poverty. And yet we're not doing that. And so I think this is not a simple question. Of course, there's a whole range of reasons for that, but I think that we do need to carve out Africa as a case at which at the moment is not like South Asia, we're using a much, much smaller, much smaller proportion of our groundwater resources for irrigation and we could double or triple or even quadruple the amount used on average and would still be far lower per area or per capita in terms of groundwater use than for example, South Asia,
[0:08:39] Bridget Scanlon: Right? And this report mentioned that and another World Bank report mentioned that 800 million people in China moved out of the lowest poverty sector and about 415 million people in India have moved out of the most acute poverty range and probably irrigation and food security and climate resilience had a big part to play in their being able to reduce their population with high poverty status. So I think this is really important, irrigation, water, fertilizers, seeds, all of those things that go into food security, water security are very important. I
[0:09:20] Jude Cobbing: I completely agree. I mean, there's no doubt that irrigation is one of the cornerstones of food security and the correlation between irrigated area and agricultural production is profound. Any farmer will tell you particularly farmers in semi arid areas or areas that are are subject to climate swings such as they are across much of Africa will tell you that without irrigation, the risk is just so much higher. And so there's no question that irrigation is linked very closely to food security. This was one of the ways in which South Asia, in which China and indeed in which the United States and Europe were able to increase the food surplus produced by their agricultural land and diversify and grow economically. And very few people would argue that we need to see a large increase in irrigated agricultural area in Africa. No doubt about it.
[0:10:19] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And another one of the statistics in the multidimensional poverty index was that 84% of poor people live in rural areas. And so then I think, and their dependence on agriculture. And so groundwater, which is sort of considered a decentralized water source could readily help to improve the situation in those rural areas.
[0:10:43] Jude Cobbing: It really could. I mean, conservatively, we estimate that rural people in Africa depend 75% of those rural folks depend on groundwater for their domestic water supplies, either through springs or boreholes or shallow wells or another technology. And when we talk about irrigation, it's often only fairly small amounts that we need, we're not necessarily only talking about high yielding wells. We can, we're talking about small volumes of water can make all the difference between a family garden or a communal garden being resilient to a drought or them losing everything that they've planted. So you're absolutely right. Groundwater is a real cornerstone of household resilience and poverty resilience in rural Africa.
[0:11:36] Bridget Scanlon: And I think a lot of these farms in rural Africa, they're very small, they're 1 to 2 hectares. And so, and I think you mentioned before that in some countries, people are just taking buckets of water to those crops to improve production. And so a liter per second or half a liter per second could go a long ways to helping them improve their food security.
[0:12:00] Jude Cobbing: Yes, it does. Absolutely. So even small amounts can make a huge difference. And my colleagues who know more than I do about irrigation talk rightly about farmer led irrigation. We put the tools into the hands of farmers to decide what they need to irrigate what technologies they need and what volumes they need and they know best. They're the local people, they understand the crops and the climate the best. And the key thing is to enable them in a whole range of ways to irrigate for them to lead the irrigation revolution that's needed.
[0:12:36] Bridget Scanlon: And I think the World Bank has a group that is called the farmer led irrigation group. So I think they're working directly with farmers. So I think that is an important point. So groundwater is greatly underutilized in Sub Saharan Africa. Is it because groundwater resources are much poorer in that region or they just other factors? I mean, sometimes I read in some papers, they thought that groundwater and basement aquifers in Africa were much lower than those in peninsular India or things like that. British Geological Survey report that Alan MacDonald led indicated I know 660,000 cubic kilometers of storage that's difficult for people to grasp. But a cubic kilometer is similar to a million acre feet in the US, but there seems to be a lot of water there. And so maybe it's other factors that are inhibiting development.
[0:13:32] Jude Cobbing: Well, I think you've really put your finger on it. We groundwater folk, we like to think of the groundwater as the primary constraint on irrigation or, or use of water. And we talk about all of the other things that you need, for example, in electricity supply or transport or access to banking facilities or the rule of law or pay facilities or agricultural extension or a whole dozens of other sectors, we tend to score those secondary factors and you'll see secondary factors in the literature. And actually, it's really, those are the primary reasons why there are constraints still. and we've seen in many areas, once the secondary factors can be overcome. Once there is an electricity supply, once there are markets for agricultural produce, once there's a stable banking environment or a stable institutional environment for farmers, then the groundwater resources tend not always, the groundwater resources tend to be found when they're needed. In terms of this idea that Africa is particularly low yielding as a continent. I've always had difficulty with that.There's no fundamental geological difference between Africa on the whole and other continents. It's just like other continents. It has a an unimaginably vast and varied geological environment and higher yielding boreholes tend to be anomalies anyway. So because in many places in Africa, we've only looked for low yielding community boreholes, those tend to be the that's the data that we have. So, the example for me of South Africa where I'm from shows this is a semi arid country with hard rock, complicated hard rock, fractured aquifers basement. And yet there are there are several areas where there is very good irrigation potential and indeed a very strong irrigated agriculture industry, which is a big foreign exchange earner and and in many cases, very successful,
[0:15:30] Bridget Scanlon: Right, the arguments that we sometimes hear is that, the caution that we may overexploit the aquifers or it may not be sustainable or the dialogue about transboundary aquifers, I think at the recent World Bank report, on the Hidden Wealth of Nations describes the typology of different aquifers in Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa. And one of the analogies is like an egg carton. So these are small basement that are sort of compartmentalized. And so there really isn't that much to overexploit. So they're sort of self regulating and I think people forget about that sometimes too. So I think these unsustainable or transboundary issues may be overemphasized at the risk of not developing the resource at all.
[0:16:22] Jude Cobbing: That's a lovely metaphor and a great report from the World Bank. you're absolutely right. There are places where overexploitation is a self-limiting problem and, but I would just want to be totally clear here. Nobody's calling for a, a sort of overexploitation. It is an immensely serious problem in many parts of the world, including in a few parts of South Africa and I've done research on some of those places, but you're right, the bigger problem, the much bigger problem is on how to catalyze or spark better utilization of groundwater and utilization of more groundwater. And we are unfortunately, in many cases stuck in this discourse of caution and shortage and we can't, we've got to be very careful on one side of the border in case we spark a transboundary war on the other side of the border. If we so much as drill one borehole, these are important perspectives, but my concern is that they are obscuring the real problems which are of lack of resources, lack of irrigation and lack of growth and lack of economic opportunity. And what I'll say as well is it's almost impossible to imagine how we can have environmental sustainability in many African countries without economic growth and without people having options other than exploitation of natural, their immediate natural environment. So, in a sense, I would say that looking to groundwater as a route to better irrigation, to better productivity is also a route to environmental sustainability. If that doesn't sound too strange. And I think that by pushing groundwater off the table and saying that we shouldn't use it in case we use up too much of it, that's a recipe for continued stagnation and for other kinds of environmental devastation which we see unfortunately, all too often,
[0:18:17] Bridget Scanlon: Right? So you worked in Africa for many years, Jude and I really liked your recent paper where you describe give many examples of case studies in South Africa where they have developed the resources. And so these are some of these are examples of where we would traditionally think that they were low yielding aquifers. But actually when they applied many of these questionable secondary factors and got beyond that, then they developed the resources and developed the irrigation and the crop production or the municipalities and things like that. Maybe you can describe some of these examples like the Dolomites or other regions.
[0:19:02] Jude Cobbing: Yes, sure. That's, it's really interesting. And I'm, I'm interested in South Africa because of its institutional and economic circumstances under which irrigated agriculture was promoted and pushed. Now. Don't get me wrong. This was a deeply unsavory time back in the apartheid days and I'm not for a moment saying that this is something to emulate that at the same time, there was a concerted effort to remove the secondary barriers that farmers had to irrigating using both surface water and groundwater. And there are some very interesting examples. One of which as you mentioned is the Dolomites, they called the Transvaal dolomites, very ancient Dolomites, which for decades were considered a very poor aquifer because of course, when you drill into dolomite, unless you've got more sophisticated means of finding karst conduits, you come up with dry boreholes and hydrogeologists were very wary of these until the sixties and seventies when very cheap electricity and there was government scientific support for borehole siting and many, many other ways in which agricultural productivity was underpinned and underwritten by the government. It was realized that these costs. Dolomites actually were a very good aquifer and boreholes from them typically yield up to 30 or 40 liters a second and of very high quality water. And they are are currently used for extensive irrigation. In many cases, high value crops, which obviously provide employment and foreign exchange earnings as well as food security and local economic growth.
Another interesting area is that around the town of Dendron, a small place in the middle of nowhere in, in the northern part of South Africa in basement. So in crystalline basement, which in turn most normal analyses of basement would say, well, we've got very little water here and as you say, it's the egg box metaphor and we'd be lucky to get half a liter a second. And it so happens that the tectonic setting of this basement is such that yields of 20 or 30 liters a second are obtainable. And there's a a highly productive potato growing industry that's set up around the town of Dendron as a result, they're all irrigated by groundwater from crystalline basement. And they've been through a really interesting journey if you like between, in the early days of free for all. And with, as you'd expect declining groundwater levels until the farmers got together realizing that we, we are having, there's no point in us drawing these levels down to unsustainable depths where we can't pump it anymore. And so very interesting realization that this industry because it was so valuable endogenous conservation efforts were made and interesting innovative institutional mechanisms put in place to help reverse those groundwater declines and not too dissimilar from some of the experiences in the High Plain aquifer. For example, in the United States where the industry is simply too valuable to let the groundwater levels decline and lead to a tragedy of the commons.
[0:22:17] Bridget Scanlon: Right. Yeah, I think is an example there. And also Nebraska, where the farmers come together and try to develop more sustainable practices. I think you had another example of fractured quartzites, a system that was developed, I guess the acronym was or something.
[0:22:35] Jude Cobbing: Yes, that's right. That was a a really interesting project in the Cape Fold Mountains which are inter layered quartzites and shales along the edge of the basin. In South Africa, tectonic complex, quartzite layers form highly productive aquifers, very good quality water. The quartzite is very pure so that the water tends to have a very, very low conductivity and a low ph and it's often confined by the shale layers. So drilling conditions are difficult. The quartzite is very hard. Drilling is not easy. You've often got to drill to substantial depths to access it. And at which point it's often artesian or sub artesian. And you are also dealing with the various management issues around balancing the recharge with discharge. There are thermal water issues. There's it's a fascinating hydrogeological environment and there have been there's been a lot of work done on this. So for example, this DAGEOS project looking at delineating these resources and quantifying how much can be sustainably abstracted without harming ecosystems in the area. And interestingly enough, the project to some extent stalled because not because there was no groundwater, not because we couldn't overcome the technical and hydrogeological limitations. But there was concern by local farmers that this deep drilling would damage their long-term water resource prospects. And even though the aquifers were different, the target aquifer was much deeper and find nevertheless, this led to such complexity that the project was put on hold. And it just goes to illustrate that the problems are often around the institutional and the management side of things. How do we bring all stakeholders on board? How do we communicate? Well, how do we ensure that we're, our abstractions are sustainable and compared to that a lot of the hydrogeological, the so-called technical problems are actually relatively simple to solve with, enough resources and expertise.
[0:24:43] Bridget Scanlon: I don't think we want to admit that our part of the puzzle is the easy part.
[0:24:49] Jude Cobbing: That's right. No, you're quite
[0:24:52] Bridget Scanlon: Right. But I visited Cape Town many years ago, Rick Healy and I did a short course on groundwater recharge there. And we met Julian Conrad who was running fairly large consulting firm now for hydrogeology and he was working on the Sandveld region in the southwest Cape and Sandveld is recharged from the mountains to the east and they monitor the groundwater levels. And as long as the groundwater levels remain stable, everything is OK. But then if they start declining, then they evaluate and maybe ratchet back on the pumping and stuff. So, very nice example, again, growing potatoes and rooibos tea and employing thousands of people, which is fantastic, you know. So if people look at Google Earth, they can see those irrigation circles and then if they are managed appropriately and with experts, then I think it's feasible to develop these resources. So you have mentioned a lot of questionable secondary parameters that can limit groundwater development. And I guess if we compare Africa to India where it has gone gangbusters and may be too much but costs of pumps and drilling expertise and energy subsidies. Many of these things differ between India and Africa and maybe Africa may need some Sub-Saharan Africa may need some incentives and some things to alleviate some of those barriers to create an environment for development. What are your thoughts on that, pumps and fertilizers, energy access and financing and things
[0:26:34] Jude Cobbing: I absolutely agree. Many of these things are much more expensive in Africa than they are in South Asia for a whole range of reasons that we don't yet have a great handle on. We know roughly what's why these things are more expensive, but very little work has been done on. So what are the constraints to cheaper drilling or cheaper pumps or cheaper spare parts or cheaper expertise? better data storage better information. And it's partly because we haven't yet thrown our weight behind the need to expand irrigated agriculture from groundwater. We are still in this frame of mind that says we've got to be extremely cautious about any groundwater irrigation or any expansion of groundwater because before we know it, we could go the same way as South Asia and have a third of our aquifer blocks over exploited. Now, the irrigation intensity or the groundwater withdrawal intensity in South Asia is easily 10 times, 20 times what it is in Africa with one or two very small exceptions. And so we could double, we could triple, we could quadruple area irrigated by groundwater in Africa without getting anywhere near the problems in South Asia. On average. I'm certainly not saying that this applies everywhere. What I will say as well. So is that I'm a huge fan of Tushar Shah's work. He, he wrote a book called Taming the Anarchy, the International Water Management Institute. And he pointed out that these farmer led groundwater irrigation revolutions are fundamentally not something that any external body can easily control. What there's this idea that somehow there's a kind of global collective of people of experts who control exactly what development happens and how and when and actually our experience is that we need to let farmers have access to the resources that they need. In the case of India. It was, it was cheaper pumps and cheaper electricity in some cases, cheaper fuel and they will then drive the revolution and it will be anarchic. At first, there's no question of that. It will be difficult to control. And I think that's something we have to get our minds around as hydrogeologists, which is that we actually have very limited control over this. And we've got to accept that it will never go according to how we think it might and planning. It is in my opinion, a little futile, particularly planning for the environmental disbenefits before they're visible to anyone. People are interested in their immediate problems. And it's only when you start to see declines in water tables, that very innovative solutions start coming to the fore. And yeah, I appreciate this is controversial, but it's nevertheless, I think we really need to be a little bit humble in the sort of international development and planning community and genuinely let local people have the resources that they need in order to do irrigation as they see best. And there will be a period of anarchy. But the rewards are potentially enormous in terms of growth, in terms of alleviation of poverty and suffering. And ultimately, in terms of environmental safety and security, you can't have environmental sustainability and safety, coexisting with extreme human poverty in my opinion.
[0:29:57] Bridget Scanlon: That's a great point. And one of the things in your paper, you mentioned different phases of development, the triggering phase, the growth phase and the maturation phase that we have seen in India or China and these other countries. But that sub-Saharan Africa is just at the bottom, it just is not developing. And so I think it was very nice to read that description of how these regions have developed and maybe what to anticipate, we would need to go through in Sub Saharan Africa. And what some people suggest is that, Alan MacDonald mentioned that about 40% of the aquifers in Sub Saharan Africa are basement aquifers and that these are essentially self-regulating. There is not enough really to over exploit and they recharge every year or every couple of years. And so it's not in the hands of the people exploiting them, they're kind of self regulating themselves by default.
[0:31:01] Jude Cobbing: I mean, there's no doubt about that Alan is completely right there are, in many of the lower yielding shallower aquifers, whether it's crystalline basement or another geology. Yes, once you've drawn the groundwater level down to your pump intake, then you can't draw down any further and it becomes a problem. And that's then a time when that problem confronts you as a farmer. And you've got to start thinking about how to maintain your irrigation. And we see in places like India and in China and and even in many parts of the United States, some very innovative solutions, institutional as well as technical solutions start coming to the fore when people are confronted by groundwater overexploitation. in my opinion, the danger is thinking that somehow this can be controlled before it happens and we don't see that empirically and you're absolutely right, there needs to be a triggering phase in terms of groundwater based irrigation and even very small increases can make enormous differences. We're not, very, very far from a situation like the Central Valley in California or mainland India where that irrigation density is such that there are very serious problems of groundwater overdraft. We don't see that across most of Africa. And I think if we ever got to that stage, it would mean we'd irrigated a lot of crop land and we had boosted the economy enormously. And there would be some very significant tradeoffs involved there,
[0:32:37] Bridget Scanlon: I think when you mention small shallow aquifers which are prevalent in much of Sub Saharan Africa. These differ quite substantially from the large scale aquifers like the Nubian aquifer in North Africa and stuff where we've got huge storage or the Indo Gangetic basin, huge alluvial kilometers thick. We're just talking about 20 to 30 m deep or even less. And so these are quite different systems. It sort of reminds me of the levee system with flooding control. People build a levee and then they're not exposed to regular floods, then they kind of forget about it and then they build on the levee. So, but if the farmers experience this depletion on a regular basis, then they will learn to work within the dynamics of their aquifer system and then that will sort of regulate it.
[0:33:27] Jude Cobbing: I mean, I, I like your flooding analogy. as I only need to tell you, Richard Taylor’s episodic recharge in semiarid Africa is a huge feature. And in other words, you'll have a steady decline perhaps of an aquifer over many years of normal rainfall. And it's only, let's say in the ninth or 10th year, you'll have an abnormal rainfall year and recharge again. And so we need longer records. We need better data for us to be able to look at those kinds of features. But the idea that a water budget is something we should, we should be calculating just in one year is easy to see in many semi arid regions. It's just not the case that it we need longer time frames and we need better data and it highlights the need for better data, no doubt about it.
[0:34:15] Bridget Scanlon: In terms of the factors that impact irrigation. One of the things that you mentioned is energy, energy access. And I think in this multidimensional poverty index, they indicated that 80% of poor people who lack access to electricity live in Sub Saharan Africa So energy access is a huge issue there. But maybe solar energy and renewable energy. You don't need a grid. Maybe that is helping. Although I don't think it has taken off as much as we would like possibly. But there really are attempts. I know the World Bank is trying to switch wells from diesel to solar in Tanzania and other countries and large projects in that area. So that might help with the energy access part of it.
[0:35:02] Jude Cobbing: Yes, I really hope so. There's some really exciting developments in solar energy. The prices are coming down for solar panels, there are better solar borehole pumps and I for one hope that there's a a solar energy revolution and cheaper pumps become much more widely available. Unfortunately, there's still this idea that we need some again, this omniscient, we need to limit the availability of solar pumps in case it has impacts on groundwater levels. And all I'll say to that is that we'd need a heck of a lot of solar pumps to make much of an impact on groundwater levels in most countries. But if we did, it would mean that people were using that water to grow food and that's what we need. We, that's really what we need, we need that economic boost, we need that assistance. So I'm all for it. The rural Africa is enormous and the prospect for extending conventional electricity grids seem problematic at the moment and with a bit of luck, decentralized clean power from solar panels will play a big part in that mix,
[0:36:08] Bridget Scanlon: And another aspect that you mention is financing. So there are these micro financing groups and and also cellphone technology that allow farmers to access credit and stuff. So a lot of these things can be sort of transformational in irrigation expansion and hopefully incrementally each of them. But together then if we can bring a lot of these factors and manage them, then maybe we can advance irrigation application.
[0:36:37] Jude Cobbing: Agree totally Bridget. I mean, it's astonishing to me how little research has been done on the multiplicity of these factors that prevent wider uptake of irrigation technology and the ways in which they interact with each other. As you said, if you don't have access to credit and you're not able to raise the $200 for a pump, it might as well cost $2 million for all the availability that you might have. You simply can't access it and these things ramify into each other. So your pump availability and cost, you've got to add that to all of the other bottlenecks. And agriculture is a precarious business at the best of times. And with too many of these nonlinear bottlenecks, it's very easy to make it just simply unviable and people then are tempted to fall back on traditional rainfed agriculture, which is very risky but requires relatively little in terms of input. But at the same time, arguably consigns people to very low rates of economic growth and much poorer chances of escaping from poverty.
[0:37:42] Bridget Scanlon: You mentioned earlier that the upcoming International Association of Hydrogeologists meeting is going to be in Cape Town in the near future. And you've been talking with some of your colleagues about the upcoming meeting, I guess that's a very exciting time for them. And so it would be interesting to see the presentations and all of that sort of thing from the meeting. Any thoughts on that or what are you learning about that?
[0:38:06] Jude Cobbing: And I'm really thrilled that the IAH Congress is going to be in Africa again. And I was speaking a little earlier to the Southern African Development Community Groundwater Management Institute and also to the South African Water Research Commission and they're gearing up to participate in that. And I'm hoping for some really good conversations about groundwater management, groundwater utilization, better data for groundwater, a higher profile for hydrogeology. So, I mean, let's learn all about day zero in Cape Town and that we have promises made at the time about having auxiliary supplies from the fairly extensive aquifers in and around Cape Town. And it seems to me I may be wrong, but it seems to me that those plans have been quietly shelved now and not as much as being is being done as could be done. Until of course, the next time we have a crisis. And let's not forget. As you mentioned, the British Geological Survey work on quantifying groundwater resources in Africa. This is by far the biggest water resource and storage and on average, it's buffering potential is enormous and it can really act as a backup to cities and keep things running when, increasing the erratic surface water resources may temporarily fail us.
[0:39:24] Bridget Scanlon: So I recall that the South African development community, they had a really nice database of groundwater level hydrographs and Mark Cuthbert and others have published papers on these hydro graphs. And so when you look at them, you see ups and downs but mostly in response to wet and dry climate cycles and the evidence of the episodic recharge that you mentioned that we can't operate on an annual timescale in many of the same year. We just would need to consider a longer time frame. And so I think sometimes I use an analogy of bank account when I'm talking about groundwater resources. And so how much you put in, how much you pull out? But if you just look at the balance, which would be the water level hydrographs. If they're stable, then maybe you're doing OK. And I think Julian Conrad when he works with people in the Sandveld region, monitors the water level hydrographs and the water quality and to ensure that the resource is being managed sustainably. So data are very important. And I think the more data that we can get and I the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center (IGRAC) are compiling global data on that. And so I think that's very important to look at long-term records, as you mentioned.
[0:40:38] Jude Cobbing: Totally agree. I mean, it's astonishing how few long-term groundwater records are actually available in many, many African countries, even South Africa, which has a relatively well resourced groundwater sector and has a long running groundwater level monitoring program, the density of monitoring stations is still lacking and we only get a dim picture of what's really going on. And as I say before, there are folks not the least yourself. We understand a lot more than I do about long-term recharge. But we definitely do need to look at it over the longer term and particularly as the climate changes, we know that it's episodic in semi-arid areas. And we don't understand enough about that yet. And the old saying that you can't manage what you don't measure that holds true, I'm afraid. And we need ideally a radical improvement in data collection, data interpretation and the turning of that data into knowledge products that are useful for decision makers. We need to make it accessible and available. There's a great need for that. We have far too little resource on that at the moment.
[0:41:43] Bridget Scanlon: And you mentioned earlier that Jude about our guest today is Jude Cobbing from Save the Children. You mentioned about day zero in Cape Town where they were 100% reliant on six large reservoirs and the storage in the reservoirs declining very rapidly and they were approaching day zero. But groundwater development in Cape Town was almost zip. But at that time, then they brought in a temporary desalination project. And also I know some people still Conrad and others started to look at the some of the aquifers there. Then I think it was the MS or something and then Table Mountain and Cape Flats and other aquifers. But as you say, psychology is, if you get beyond the crisis, then you kind of forget about it until you are faced with it again. So I think that's the classic case because the temporary disaster went away and you said maybe some of the groundwater development has been sort of shelved. So I think, yes,
[0:42:43] Jude Cobbing: unfortunately, as we all know, as groundwater scientists, the problem with groundwater is you can't see it. It's a very difficult thing to sell or, or a very difficult thing to get people interested in because there's nothing as unglamorous as a borehole is there. And when you, we really struggle to give it a profile that it needs and to communicate the resource that is there. And obviously, when a crisis hits, it's then usually too late to start planning drilling and boreholes and groundwater management. You've got to do that beforehand. And there is some really interesting work being done. But nevertheless, I think it does need to be seen as a strategic resource and something that could be drawn on in another crisis. Heaven forbid there is another day zero crisis in Cape Town. But if there were, then it would be really good to see a kind of comprehensive groundwater plan as part of the solution as part of the insurance policy against that. And I do believe as well, we need to start to quantify these things economically. We need to say what day zero cost and what such an insurance program could save us in terms of resources in order to be able to release some of those resources that would need to develop it.
[0:43:52] Bridget Scanlon: Right? I know you think a lot of people may think groundwater is not very glamorous and I think United Nations had the term groundwater making the invisible visible this past year. And so I live in Austin, Texas and we have the Edwards limestone aquifer, which is pretty dynamic. And I think in the news media because the city of San Antonio depends almost 100% reliant on groundwater. They talk about the water level data in J17 well. And so everybody almost knows what J17 is that they monitor that all the time. And so it gives them an idea of how deep a drought is or whether they need to ratchet back irrigating their lawns like they're living in the UK or something like that.
[0:44:38] Jude Cobbing: So I think we could all learn something from the state of Texas there. as you say, it's groundwater is front and center in the news sometimes. And it should be in other places too because it's just as important. And if we want to keep it in mind, then we do need to do things like that and we need to get public understanding on board and people should know where their water comes from and what the things they need to do to manage it.
[0:45:02] Bridget Scanlon: Right? When I introduced you earlier, Jude, I mentioned that you are in charge of integrated water resources management to Save the Children. And considering that, for example, Cape Town was 100% reliant on surface water. There's an opportunity there to manage surface water and groundwater conjunctively. And I think maybe there are some examples of that in South Africa with the Atlantis program and other examples. And so I think we need more to move more towards that. And if you have surface water, that's great because irrigating with surface water water can recharge groundwater and then use groundwater during extreme droughts or things like that. So this conjunctive management of surface water and groundwater I think is extremely important.
[0:45:49] Jude Cobbing: I think it's the only way to go. And you mentioned Atlantis, the small town to the northwest of Cape Town where there's a very, very innovative managed aquifer recharge scheme which has been in operation for many years and that was revived as day zero came closer. The Atlantis scheme had been falling into a bit of neglect and it was rapidly revived. And as far as I know it is working very well again. And so the expertise is there, there's a huge opportunity to conjunctive use surface water and groundwater. And all we're asking for as groundwater scientists, I suppose is to have the water resource that, that we know about given the same level of importance or, or given the same kind of attention as the surface water resources. I used to go sometimes at the Department of Water Affairs in South Africa going to visit them. They'd have all these pictures of huge dams down their corridors as you walk down the corridors, these great big concrete dams across the rivers in South Africa. And I'd say to them, why are there no pictures of boreholes when more than half of all South Africans rely on groundwater as a domestic resource with aerial pictures of boreholes. And but I can see that it's not nearly as glamorous as a dam.
[0:47:02] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, but I mean, maybe some pictures of the springs and stuff, one of the things that I should have known all along was considering currently the population of Africa, India and China. They reach about 1.4 billion people. But the difference is that China supposedly peaked last year and it would be declining and India is not projected to increase a lot. But in contrast, the population of Africa is supposed to double by 2050 increase much further by 2100. So that's going to amplify the issues that you have been describing, which is water security, food security, energy access, all of these things. So I think it really underscores the importance of using groundwater to help with economic development and Millennium Development Goals and things like that.
[0:47:59] Jude Cobbing: I totally agree, there are some very sobering demographic figures that are real that are coming and we know that things are gonna look different in 20 years time, 30 years, time in terms of, of both population numbers in Africa and also that the split between rural and urban populations, groundwater is gonna have a big role to play in food and water security for both. And the sooner we get started on understanding it better on managing it better on thinking about the constraints to its use and also thinking about areas that are being over abstracted and what needs to be done for those. The sooner we get started on that task, the easier it's gonna be and the better it's gonna be. And because there's no doubt that we need to see some changes in the sector over the next two or three decades.
[0:48:48] Bridget Scanlon: Well, I think we're all realizing that we need a portfolio of options to create a more resilient future, whether it's water, food security, climate resilience to extremes, droughts and floods. And so groundwater can play a huge role in that transformation in Sub Saharan Africa. And I think your work really highlights that and trying to change the dialogue around those issues. So I really appreciate your efforts and commend you in taking that stance and elucidating those concerns.
[0:49:23] Jude Cobbing: Well, thank you, Bridget. It means a huge amount to me for you to state that it really does particularly coming from you. Thank you is all I can say and I agree with you. I think we do need to have a bigger conversation about all of these things and we need to have it soon.
[0:49:37] Bridget Scanlon: Right. So thank you so much. Our guest today is Jude Cobbing from Save the Children a groundwater hydrologist with lots of experience in Africa and many other countries. Thank you so much for talking with us today to take care.
[0:49:52] Jude Cobbing: Thank you very much Bridget for this opportunity. I really appreciate it
