My research so far: three reoccurring topics

Since beginning my exploration of how climate change is predicted to impact freshwater resource supply across Africa, I have found three reoccurring trains of thought within the literature. These are...

1. Climate change is predicted to affect freshwater resources differently: there is no uniform trend, especially when regarding the whole continent.

On the whole, Africa is expected to experience a future decrease in water availability, in which climate change is partly responsible (Niang et al., 2014). Reiterating on earlier posts, climate change will affect surface water and groundwater reserves differently; climate change is expected to affect surface water supplies greater than groundwater supplies, with some groundwater supplies even offering potential adaptation and resilience to climate change's impact on surface water supplies. Significantly, different parts of Africa will experience different types of impacts. 

2. It's hard to predict how climate change will affect freshwater resources because there are some serious data issues, specifically absence of field data. 

There is generally an inadequate amount of observational data in Africa, which leads to systematic limitations in proficiently estimating the availability of future freshwater supplies (Niang et al., 2014). There are absences in both temporal and spatial coverage of hydrogeological and hydrometrological observations: for instance, surface and groundwater hydrology is determined by various interacting drivers and factors, but due to the lack of reliable estimates of groundwater storage in Africa, there is a lack of quantitative understanding in the relationship between climate and groundwater recharge (Taylor et al., 2009; Taylor et al., 2012). Declining data quality and availability (e.g. Figure 2) has been widely declared in Africa and there is now a recognition that this problem must be dealt with order to assess sufficiently the problems related to climate change (e.g. Pitman, 2011). 

Figure 1: Number of rainfall stations open each year in Africa (Pitman, 2011)

3. Non-climatic factors, such as population growth and urbanisation, can significantly affect freshwater resource availability. These must be taken into account when predicting the availability of future freshwater resources. 

Population growth, urbanisation, agricultural growth, and landuse change are expected with high confidence to all affect future freshwater availability. Climate change, conversely, is expected to only have a modest effect on future freshwater availability (Niang et al., 2014). There are many studies that show this. Beck and Bernauer (2011), for instance, concluded that non-climatic drivers (such as the ones above) are predicted to have a significant influence on future water availability in the Zambezi River Basin. Similarly, Droogers et al. (2012) found that climate change will only account for 22 percent of future water shortages in North Africa by 2050, compared to socioeconomic drivers causing 78 percent of the shortages. 

All of these points keep being made, especially the latter two. But, Africa is a huge continent (three times the size of Europe!) so it can be hard to quantify, or even apprehend, all the factors that interact with climate change and its impact on freshwater security - I think it's time I focused in on a certain location in order to gain a greater understanding of this hugely complicated problem.