The African freshwater system: pressure-impact relationships, changes, and risks

Water is critical for human existence and all life as we know it. This project investigates how pressures of climate change and human land- and water-use developments combine to impact freshwater flow, availability, drought and flood variations and changes, aiming to identify significant and critical impacts of future change scenarios for societies and ecosystems around Africa. The objectives are ambitious and go beyond the state of the art in innovatively advancing interdisciplinary water resource science that overcomes the commonly fragmented view of freshwater aspects and problems as just local, associated with specific disciplines or societal sectors. In this project, the freshwater system will be integrated, recognizing and accounting for its actual physical-hydrological and change-driver connections, to discover emergent largescale patterns of pressure-impact relationships and possible tipping points to severe/irreversible societal/ecosystem impacts for different parts of the African continent.