A well is not enough

Periods of extreme drought affect millions of farmers and shepherds in sub-Saharan Africa causing deaths, famine and migration. After ten years of prolonged heat and drought, 2022 was one of the driest on record for the macro-region. In Southern Angola, for example, it is reported to be the worst environmental crisis in 40 years: rivers have disappeared, dusty the dry soils are cracked, pastures scorched by the sun.

Both NGOs and governments have attempted to aid the local population with the construction of small infrastructures to bring water to the surface to sustain the population, livestock and crop fields. By building these wells, reservoirs and small ponds these entities alongside volunteers, hope to enable the continued practice of agriculture and pastoralism.

It was precisely in southern Angola and during one such well-building campaign in 2021 that Luigi Piemontese, a researcher at the University of Florence and an expert in water management, was involved in the development of a cooperation project aimed at helping the local population of mainly nomadic pastoralists to survive in severe drought conditions.

“Coping with extreme drought events and climate change can be done in several ways. The one that people in southern Angola have used so far is nomadism,” explains Luigi Piemontese. Local people tend to know where to move when drought strikes in order to find water. “In the territory there is always a certain gradient of drought, there are extremely arid areas where, especially in the case of prolonged drought, there is no possibility of practicing any agriculture or pastoralism. There are, however, less arid areas where conditions periodically appear for planting something and grazing one’s livestock.”

The construction of wells is another way of coping with drought and certainly has greater immediate benefits than nomadism: the tribe does not have to move, but has water available for their flocks and also for practicing subsistence farming. During his visits to the villages, Luigi Piemontese noticed another consequence of this type of well construction: the population around the well becomes much more settled, which, among other things, is greatly appreciated by the country’s central government, which in this way can at least count and control its population better.

But what happens when a well around which population has settled runs out? Or if an even greater extreme heat event occurs?

The researcher could only hazard a guess based on his field experience since the scientific literature did not offer detailed studies regarding the consequences of building small water infrastructure to solve the problem of extreme drought. As a result, the University of Florence researcher petitioned Stefano Terzi, a water engineer at Eurac Research, for help in studying the matter in more depth. Together they built a more holistic model that analyzes the possible long-term consequences of field activities.

“Resettlement of course is not a bad thing in itself. But it has consequences, especially when practiced for a long time in an extremely drought-prone area like some areas in southern Angola,” Stefano Terzi and Luigi Piemontese explain. “It thus increases the consumption of water resources, and if these wells fail to meet needs because they run out or because of the arrival of a further, even more pronounced wave of drought, the population that had relied on these SWIs could find itself in more serious trouble than before.”

Indeed, there is a risk that these communities may have lost the inclination to move to areas with more water, partly because they have invested economically in the areas around the wells in the meantime. In being sedentary, these populations may have also lost the knowledge involved to move, the so-called traditional knowledge. Ultimately, the construction of wells without this intelligence or knowledgeable governance, although it improves the situation in the immediate term, could worsen living conditions in the medium to long term.