A GERD Water Sharing Policy: In the Eyes of Foreign Expert By ABN staff writer Dr. Paul Block has been developing a water policy specifically for the GERD that gets conditioned on natural hydrologic variability. “When we think about water security, we think about water scarcity. Even within the Nile basin, there are very different priorities and contexts we need to remember and take account of” he says. In downstream countries particularly Egypt the challenge is a physical water scarcity. Whereas for the upstream countries, the focus is much more on economic water scarcity and that is perhaps the lack of development of infrastructure to take advantage of. One of Kevin Wheeler papers shows there are periods where flows are naturally high and some years. And some periods where flows are average and some are low. This has been the context for hundreds and thousands of years and the countries have been subjected to these natural variability. Where the renaissance dam is located most of the variability happens July to October. Before the GERD exists, if there is a large amount of stream flow in some year all of that stream flow is passed down the stream. Likewise, if a small amount of stream flow passes leaving Ethiopia and going into Egypt and a small amount passes downstream. “It is a policy that explicitly takes into account natural hydrologic variability and shares that variability and those risks among all the countries.
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Abyssinia Business Network // ABN
“It is a policy that explicitly takes into account natural hydrologic variability and shares that variability and those risks among all the countries. This is not a policy that explicitly favors Ethiopia, Sudan or Egypt. But explicitly shares these risks among the countries”
ልዩ እትም 2013 Special Edition of GERD 2021
