Edo Abraham (Ph.D.),

Assistant Professor in Water & Control at TU Delft’s Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences.

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the benefits of integrating the planning of a multi-reservoir system in nexus with agricultural and electricity infrastructure between riparian states in the Eastern Nile basin. I will introduce a regional hard-linked WEF-nexus model that explicitly represents resource connectivity networks, gridded agro-hydrological potentials and constraints, national socio-economic demands, and non-linear operational processes to optimize reservoir operations, water allocations, cropping patterns, electricity mixes and trade quantities on a monthly time-step over multiple years in a receding horizon fashion. Using a historic simulation over 20 years, we depict the potential benefits from cooperation, the importance of adequate representations of spatial and temporal heterogeneity of resources and their connectivity, as well as the need for a more diverse set of collaboration scenarios to facilitate planning in transboundary river systems. By then looking further into the future, with GERD operational, we analyze the potential and distributional aspects of cooperative scenarios.