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Please contact the author with any questions. A compressed tar.b2z file is attached with the groundwater model input files., Wadi El Naturn, located in the Western Desert in northern Egypt, has been subject to significant groundwater degradation since the 1990s, attributed primarily to agricultural development. Information required to diagnose the drivers of groundwater degradation and assess management options in dryland environments like Wadi El Natrun is however, frequently sparse. This research presents an approach for modeling the impacts of dryland environmental change on groundwater in the context of sparse data. A focus is placed on understanding the potential impacts of conservation strategies in the context of climate change. Water use, hydrostratigraphic and groundwater flow data were collected from literature, monitoring records, satellite imagery and a survey of local landholders. MODFLOW-NWT was used to model the multi-layer aquifer system, and algorithms were developed in R to create realizations of groundwater recharge, and well-pumping at a monthly time-step from 1957 to 2011. The model was deemed to be reasonably capable of capturing the cumulative impact of environmental change over this historical period. A risk assessment approach was then used to assess the impact of climate change and conservation-focused management scenarios on groundwater locally over a 50-year future planning horizon. The optimization of irrigation systems and increased cultivation of drought/salt tolerant crops have the potential to significantly reduce the risk of groundwater depletion compared to an across-the-board 20% water use reduction scenario. The influence of groundwater pumping also outweighed that of climate change, and the most vulnerable water users/ecosystem were found to be the most exposed to groundwater degradation., Master of Applied Science (MASc)

In this thesis I argue that it is an implication of the acceptance of the human right to water and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that violations of the human right to water can invoke the Responsibility to Protect. Extreme violations of the right to water can invoke the responsibility to react, and ultimately the responsibility to prevent and rebuild. Although this is the case, I argue that the human right to water is unlikely to invoke R2P on its own. Instead, water issues are more likely to compound with issues of poverty, weak political institutions, poor leadership and social tension to create situations that have the potential for mass atrocity. Furthermore, I provide an analysis of the actions that will need to be taken before, during and after an intervention to fulfill the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild and the actors that can and/or should take such action., Master of Arts (MA)

In this thesis I argue that the utility of employing the human right to water within discussions of water security is intimately related to the population under consideration, such that its use can be more or less effective depending on whose water security one is considering. This is owed to the fact that employing the human right to water in discussions of water security is useful only in the case of states that are able to satisfy the conditions necessary for the successful implementation of the human right to water as a positive legal right: i) being possessed of adequate amounts of the resource in question, ii) being possessed of the political willingness to provide the resource, and iii) being possessed of the capacity, including the infrastructure, to supply the end user with the resource., Master of Arts (MA)