Estimating the Impact of Land Use Change on the Soil Erosion Hazard in the Zambezi River Basin

Leenaers, H. (1990). Estimating the Impact of Land Use Change on the Soil Erosion Hazard in the Zambezi River Basin. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-90-024

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Abstract

The formulation of the environmentally sound and sustainable policy for land use and water resources management requires development of methods necessary to predict the consequences of various human activities on the environment. The IIASA Water Resources Project (WAT) addresses this issue in several ways, one of them is the development of a Decision Support System for Large River Basins. Its objective is to elaborate a set of models and PC-AT interactive software package capable of analyzing problems that may arise in developing hydropower and irrigation systems, land use management and agricultural activity. The Zambezi river basin was selected as a case study for the implementation of the above methodology.

This paper is devoted to soil erosion problem in the Zambezi river basin. Its importance for water resources planners arises inter alia from the fact that erosion processes may seriously influence the operation of reservoir systems due to silt deposition diminishing storage capacity. The model for estimating soil erosion hazard was used in combination with a number of land use scenarios. For these scenarios areas subject to particularly high erosion hazard were selected for the Zambezi. The paper presents a good starting point for further investigations on land use/climate/water resources interface.

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