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In the Volta Basin, infrastructure watershed development with respect to the impact of climate conditions is hotly debated due to the lack of adequate tools to model the consequences of such development. There is an ongoing debate on the impact of further development of small and medium scale reservoirs on the water level of Lake Volta, which is essential for hydropower generation at the Akosombo power plant. The GLOWA Volta Project (GVP) has developed a Volta Basin Water Allocation System (VB-WAS), a decision support tool that allows assessing the impact of infrastructure development in the basin on the availability of current and future water resources, given the current or future climate conditions. The simulated historic and future discharge time series of the joint climate-hydrological modeling approach (MM5/WaSiM-ETH) serve as input data for a river basin management model (MIKE BASIN). MIKE BASIN uses a network approach, and allows fast simulations of water allocation and of the consequences of different development scenarios on the available water resources. The impact of the expansion of small and medium scale reservoirs on the stored volume of Lake Volta has been quantified and assessed in comparison with the impact of climate variability on the water resources of the basin.

Assessing and managing water resources in developing and dryland regions is still fraught with difficulties. The typical tool chain of water resources management starts with the collection of data, subsequently processes and analyses the collected information within the natural and socio-economic setting, and finally generates end products that inform decision-making. However, several of these steps often turn out to be problematic when faced with development issues and severe strains on water resources. Many of these regions are characterised by very complex hydrological systems that often exhibit extreme behaviour, such as strong monsoon seasons or extended drought. Commonly used models and analysis techniques may not represent these processes, or at best they are seldom tested for adequacy and robustness. The complexity of the water cycle contrasts strongly with the poor data availability, which limits the number of analysis techniques and methods available to researchers. Finally, technical solutions should take into account the socio-economic setting in which they will be embedded, and address the need for capacity development to ensure that newly introduced technologies and solutions improve the regional skills in water resources management. This special issue aims to highlight the diversity and complexity of the issues faced in a context of development and resources scarcity. It brings together a collection of papers that

As multiple countries share a river, the likelihood of a water resource conflict from climate change could be higher between countries. In this paper, we demonstrate how countries can cooperate in transboundary water sharing in a sustainable way, given the impacts of climate change. We illustrate the case of water sharing of the Volta River between the upstream and downstream country, Burkina Faso and Ghana respectively, where the latter country faces a tradeoff of water use between agriculture in the north and production of hydro energy in the south. In the framework of a stochastic Stackelberg differential game, we have shown how the issue of water sharing could be linked to hydropower export that can make water sharing between the countries sustaining in the event of climate change. Our results indicate that during cooperation, Ghana will have an opportunity to increase its water abstraction for agriculture, which has remained largely restricted. We also find that the equilibrium strategies in the long run steady state distribution are stable even with increasing variances of water flow.

The paper explores the scope and sustainability of a self-enforcing cooperative agreement in the framework of a game theoretic model, where the upstream and downstream country, Burkina Faso and Ghana respectively in the Volta River Basin, bargain over the level of water abstraction in the upstream. In the model we consider the case where the downstream country, Ghana, offers a discounted price for energy export to the upstream country, Burkina Faso, to restrict its water abstraction rate in the upstream. The paper examines the benefits and sustainability of such self-enforcing cooperative arrangements between Ghana and Burkina Faso given stochastic uncertainty in the river flow. The findings of the paper suggest that at the present condition, the marginal benefit of Burkina Faso from increasing the water abstraction is much higher than that of Ghana’s marginal loss. However, the paper finds that if both countries’ water abstraction rates are at a much higher level, then the marginal loss of Ghana increases phenomenally from similar increase in water abstraction rate by Burkina Faso. Under such circumstances, there is an opportunity for Ghana to provide side payments in terms of discounted export price of power in order to motivate Burkina Faso to restrict water abstraction.