Sarah Lebel

Postgraduate Student

Telephone number: +44(0) 113 34 34696
Email address: eesl@leeds.ac.uk
Room: 9.160e

Biography

My academic training (B.Eng and MSc Bioresource) is in the area of Agricultural Engineering. Through this field of study, I gained interest in soil and water management applied to developing countries. This led me to undertake a research internship at the International Potato Center (CIP-CGIAR) in Lima, Peru in 2008. This research experience triggered my interest relative to food security and natural resources management. I was introduced to the basics of land-use determination using remote sensing, as well as the use of GIS for climate variability projects. This experience encouraged me to undertake my MSc thesis focusing on the hydrological impacts of rainwater harvesting structures in a semi-arid watershed of India. This work, in collaboration with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT-CGIAR) in India, allowed me to gain further experience at the international level, working as a member of a highly interdisciplinary team of expert scientists in India and Canada. The work I want to conduct at Leeds will directly complement the knowledge I have gained through these experiences, by allowing me to broaden the scope of my expertise in soil and water management to both the biophysical and the socio-economic aspects of rainwater harvesting technologies in Africa.

Qualifications

M.Sc. Bioresource Engineering, McGill University (2011)

B. Eng. Bioresource Engineering, McGill University (2010)

Project details

Project title

Water harvesting for rainfed Africa: System sustainability under climate change

Supervisors

Dr Luuk Fleskens, Prof Piers Forster, and Dr Brian Irvine (Geog)

Funding

Fully-Funded International Research Scholarship (FIRS)

Start date

1st October 2011

Project outline

Agricultural systems are undergoing important transformations due to factors such as global population increases and climate change. These issues will further cause increased pressure on natural resources such as soil and water to produce food, especially in areas where cropping conditions are already unfavourable. In dryland areas of Africa, where rainfed agriculture is predominant, precipitations can be scarce and highly unpredictable both spatially and temporally. This leads to important yield gaps in subsistence crops production. These yield gaps could be bridged through the implementation of adequate water management practices, such as rainwater harvesting (e.g. farm ponds, small on-stream dams). When effectively carried out, these techniques can significantly reduce the susceptibility of crops to the adverse effects of frequent dry spell events. Water harvesting technologies can provide an additional source of water for crop production at the most critical stages of the growing season, thereby increasing yields and food security.

It is expected that changes in global climatic patterns will exacerbate the challenges Africa is facing in terms of water management and food production. Therefore, this research project will focus on assessing, through the use of integrated modelling tools and complementary field work, the sustainability of current and proposed rainwater harvesting strategies under climate change conditions in Africa. This work will be undertaken with the collaboration of various institutions, including the University of Leeds and Wageningen University in The Netherlands, as part of the WAHARA initiative.

Using extensive field data collected in other components of the WAHARA project and data from complementary fieldwork, the biophysical PESERA (Kirkby et al., 2008) and economic DESMICE (Fleskens et al., 2009) models will be extended and validated. The proposed field work would include stakeholder interviews on climate change perceptions, and how these affect water management strategies. In addition, qualitative information relative to impact and adaptation to recent climate anomalies will be collected on site. In order to assess the impacts of climate change on water management strategies, a number of future scenarios will be developed for a 25-years period. These scenarios could for instance include looking at regional disparities in climate change across Africa. While studies regarding rainwater harvesting have long been done at the field scale, the integrated modelling approach will allow the upscaling of this study to the meso-catchment scale. Furthermore, the integration of the two models, as well as regional climate models, will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the processes that will affect the sustainability of such systems. While it is generally accepted that rainwater harvesting strategies for agricultural production can contribute to the development of small farming communities, their level of performance under varying climatic conditions is still poorly understood.

It is expected that the findings from this research project will be used as a decision-making tool for future planning and implementation of rainwater harvesting systems. The lessons learned will further contribute in the generation of a broader framework for the adaptation of water harvesting technologies across rainfed Africa.