Monitoring and modeling: Supporting decisions for livelihood improvement in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Blue Nile Basin (original) (raw)

In the Ethiopian highlands of the Blue Nile basin, lack of critical water supplies is one of the major reasons for low agricultural yields and cropping intensities and thus poor livelihoods. In these areas most past efforts in Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) have not produced desired results as these efforts wer not based on sound agro-hydrological and integrated management systems. New Integrated Rainwater Management Systems (IRMSs) need to be designed based on the landscape concepts and available water under varying agro-hydrologies to meet the demands of all sectors including ecosystem services. The new IRMS approach requires a good understanding of the hydrologic systems and employment of models to assess the impacts of various scenarios. This paper aims to fulfill exactly this gap by first