Adaptation and Water Scarcity in the Indian Ocean Region

Water problems contribute to regional political instability in many countries of the Indian Ocean region. Refugees fleeing drought are an extreme example but migration as a result of water scarcity and flooding is a growing phenomenon. Standard approaches to water management are often ineffective. Because most are long-term and require institutional restructuring, governments are unable to deliver solutions. In addition, such initiatives are often left behind by the rapid pace of social, economic and other changes occurring throughout the region. Furthermore, in some cases water management strategies generate more problems than they solve. Embankments, for example, can impede drainage and exacerbate local and trans-boundary flood impacts.

Adaptation is a Large Part of the Solution

Practical avenues for addressing the social impact of water problems can often be found by building off actions populations are already taking and by designing interventions to accommodate the natural dynamics of water systems. Often, such adaptive interventions can also help to address the basic environmental problem itself as well as the social impacts. In the case of water scarcity, for example, local populations often cope by migrating or developing non-agricultural, low water use, livelihoods. Standard water management responses to scarcity, however, emphasize increases in supply or demand management within existing activities. The first of these requires sources of supply that are often unavailable. The second is, at best, long-term.  Adaptive strategies that assist people to develop non-agricultural livelihoods or to migrate with new livelihood skills could be a more effective response. Similar adaptive strategies could apply to flooding. Rather than building embankments to control floods, an appropriate strategy might be, as people have traditionally done, to build high points or ‘islands’ for escape. None of this implies that conventional attempts to manage water resources should be rejected – but highlights the fundamental importance of complementary adaptive strategies if societies in the Indian Ocean region are to achieve water security.  

Proposed Activities

Our program will identify practical points of intervention that NGOs, communities and governments can use to mitigate the social and economic impact of floods, drought and other water security concerns through a combination of conventional and adaptive management approaches. It will include:

1. Harvesting international experiences and development of a detailed approach framework
2. Detailed field research in the Indian Ocean region
3. Institutional research to identify opportunities for better utilization of resources within existing organizations and programs
4. Media and dissemination
5. Training
6. Pilot projects

Anticipated Benefits

The research will identify practical points of intervention where programs can make a rapid difference to the problems people face due to floods, droughts and other water security concerns. The focus will be on actionable strategies for vulnerability reduction within existing institutional structures. Illustrative results this program could generate include: 

• Avenues for designing drought response programs that enable populations to shift from water-intensive agricultural activities to other forms of livelihood;

• Identification of financial mechanisms to reduce drought impacts on marginal communities and encourage adaptation;

•  Mechanisms for reducing the impact of flooding without attempting to predict or control river flows.

A key advantage of the above illustrative results is that they can be implemented at the local level with little need for higher-level institutional reform or extensive coordination. Management is wonderful in theory but coordination needs are high and initiatives often generate few practical results on the ground.

Benefiting Countries and Time Frame

This program will directly benefit countries throughout the Indian Ocean region. It will also have broad benefits for the development of effective drought and flood mitigation strategies in other regions. The program will be implemented over a five-year period. The first year will focus primarily on harvesting of international lessons, consultation with partners to fine-tune research strategies to local and country specific conditions, and preliminary field and institutional research. Field research activities will dominate during the second and third years. We hope to identify and begin planning pilot activities by the end of the second year with implementation starting in the third year. While fieldwork will continue into the fourth year of the project, we anticipate a major transition at this point toward training, implementation support, dissemination, and pilot activities. The fifth year will focus primarily on dissemination of project results. Initial results are anticipated within 18 months of project initiation.

Implementing Partners

This project will be implemented in collaboration with a broad array of partners currently participating in the Indian Ocean Research Group (IORG). 

Complementary Activities

The proposed project builds off an extensive set of complementary activities. ISET is currently collaborating with IORG and local NGOs on a project to evaluate Adaptive Strategies for Responding to Drought and Flood in South Asia. This project will provide an initial set of data, concepts, methodologies and collaborative arrangements for expanded research throughout the region. ISET has also conducted extensive research on Local Water Management with partners in India and Nepal.