9.2.1.1 Sensitivity/vulnerability of the water sector

The water sector is strongly influenced by, and sensitive to, changes in climate (including periods of prolonged climate variability). Evidence of interannual lake-level fluctuations and lake-level volatility, for example, has been observed since the 1960s, probably owing to periods of intense droughts followed by increases in rainfall and extreme rainfall events in late 1997 (e.g., in Lakes Tanganyika, Victoria and Turkana; see Riebeek, 2006). After the 1997 flood, Lake Victoria rose by about 1.7 m by 1998, Lake Tanganyika by about 2.1 m, and Lake Malawi by about 1.8 m, and very high river-flows were recorded in the Congo River at Kinshasha (Conway et al., 2005). The heavy rains and floods have been possibly attributed to large-scale atmosphere-ocean interactions in the Indian Ocean (Mercier et al., 2002).

Changes in runoff and hydrology linked to climate through complex interactions also include those observed for southern Africa (Schulze et al., 2001; New, 2002), south-central Ethiopia (Legesse et al., 2003), Kenya and Tanzania (Eriksen et al., 2005) and the wider continent (de Wit and Stankiewicz, 2006; Nkomo et al., 2006). Fewer assessments of impacts and vulnerabilities with regard to groundwater and climate interactions are available, and yet these are clearly of great concern for those dependent on groundwater for their water supply.

About 25% of the contemporary African population experiences high water stress. About 69% of the population lives under conditions of relative water abundance (Vörösmarty et al., 2005). However, this relative abundance does not take into account other equally important factors such as access to clean drinking water and sanitation, which effectively reduces the quantity of freshwater available for human use. Despite the considerable improvements in access to freshwater in the 1990s, only about 62% of the African population had access to improved water supplies in 2000 (WHO/UNICEF, 2000; Vörösmarty, 2005). As illustrated in Section 9.2.2, issues that affect access to water, including water governance, also need to be considered in any discussion of vulnerability to water stress in Africa.