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THE Omo River, flowing 621 miles from Ethiopia’s Shewan Highlands to Kenya’s Lake Turkana, creates an inland drainage basin of about 56,371 square miles.
The Omo watershed has suffered three severe droughts since the 1970s that caused widespread famine and political turmoil. The health of the basin’s population, largely indigenous tribal cultures, suffers from lack of clean fresh water for human and livestock consumption, sanitation and washing. Recent heavy flooding, connected with climate change, has caused community dislocation. Overgrazing of livestock and removal of vegetation (for fuel and open fields for crops) has added heavy sediment loads into the Omo. Small irrigation projects, reducing local agriculture’s dependence on rain, have contributed to reduction of the Omo River’s discharge into Lake Turkana by 50%.1 These regional land-use changes, and changes in rainfall and temperature, caused a recent 400% expansion of the Omo River Delta. While such changes may yield environmental benefits in this arid region, they do raise trans-boundary issues as the delta expands across into Kenya.
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Upstream dams, a new highway crossing the Omo River from Sudan to Kenya and large-scale irrigation projects could create food security within the basin and offer flood control and hydroelectric power. These projects would entail building storage and marketing facilities, as well as new roads for water and food distribution, alleviateing many problems of rain-dependent subsistence agriculture which keeps nearly half of the Ethiopian populations in poverty and without food. However, environmental consequences of such projects may include increased immigration of foreign populations and over-extraction of the Omo’s fresh water resource, negatively impacting basin cultures and ecosystems.
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