Title: Re-operating Dams for the Environment: Practices & Opportunities
Speaker: Dr Afua Owusu
About the seminar
Many rivers worldwide have been progressively engineered for agriculture, energy, transportation, flood control and navigation. Dams, in particular, have played a major role in controlling and harnessing large volumes of water to support these anthropogenic uses. While dams have undoubtedly contributed to human development, this has often come at a heavy price to downstream communities and the natural environment. The provision of environmental flows (e-flows), freshwater flows for the environment, is a means to restore or protect the benefits of naturally flowing rivers. Though e-flows science has been growing since the 1940s, actual implementation remains relatively limited. Afua will present her PhD research, which investigated how dams are re-operated for the implementation of e-flows. It began with a systematic literature review and survey of practical cases of dam re-operation followed by a case study of the Lower Volta River, Ghana. The research has generated knowledge on the process of dam re-operation for e-flows, the enabling factors for success, hurdles which typically stall the process, and inter-sectoral trade-offs inherent in delivering environmental flows. These insights inform attempts to scale up efforts to implement e-flows for the sustainable operation of dams.
About the speaker
Dr Afua Owusu, IHE Delft PhD Alumna, works at the International Water Management Institute as Postdoctoral Researcher, and is Associate Editor at Hydrological Sciences Journal. She is the Winner of the 2023 Falkenmark Award for best PhD thesis.
As a researcher specializing in hydrology and water resources management, Afua is part of the Hydroinformatics group at the International Water Management Institute, utilizing advanced remote sensing methods and data processing technologies to produce insights into water availability, usage, and sustainable limits to use. Afua completed her PhD on 'The Practice and Opportunities in Re-operating Dams for the Environment' at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and TU Delft in November 2022 and received the inaugural 2023 Falkenmark Award from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences for her research. Her research portfolio encompasses diverse projects such as environmental flows implementation, suitability mapping of solar pumps for irrigation, and the development of decision support systems for on-farm water storage sizing.
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