News
Workshop on Competing Claims on Natural Resources
In the framework of the DGIS-Wageningen UR Partnership Programme ‘Globalisation and Sustainable Rural Development’ (2006-2010), a workshop was held on 9 December 2010 at DGIS, The Hague.
The aim was to share experiences and results obtained from the four projects under Theme 2 of the Partnership Programme ‘Competing Claims on Natural Resources’.
The project 'Coping with competing claims on Water in the Inkomati Basin through Interactive Science' (WIBIS; South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique)
was led by Petra Hellegers from LEI. The WIBIS project is highly multidisciplinary and combines socio-economic expertise of LEI, technical expertise of Alterra and Waterwatch (a private consultancy enterprise), and regional knowledge and experience of WE-consult.
This WIBIS project has led to an interactive web-based discussion tool to support stakeholders in land-use planning, combining remote sensing with hydrological and socio-economic data. Instantaneously, the support tool can generate spatially-distributed transparent, impartial and verifiable information regarding the impact of land-use changes on water consumption, water productivity, the value of water, water availability and employment.
The WIBIS project supports regional initiatives, such as the LOGO-South twinning project and the PRIMA project, and has been used in stakeholder meetings in Mozambique and Swaziland in 2008, 2009 and 2010. One of the evaluated options is the plan to convert 25,000 ha of bush land in Mozambique into sugarcane for bio-fuel production. The tool can assess the impact of land conversion on the water resources, prioritise areas for conversion and track possible changes in land use to comply with national and trans-boundary water allocation agreements.
Outputs of the WIBIS project are:
- the WIBIS Discussion Support Tool;
- the WIBIS Tool Manual, training and course materials;
- Article: Hellegers, P.J.G.J., H.C. Jansen and W.G.M. Bastiaanssen: An interactive water indicator assessment tool to support land-use planning. Irrigation and Drainage
- Article: Jansen, H.C. and P.J.G.J. Hellegers (for the EL&I Knowledge Compendium). Managing water by managing land: Interactive land use planning using water productivity indicators