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Towards Development of A Decision Support System For Water Resource
Development in Semi-Arid Micro-Catchment:
By Patrick Barre Moriarty
Price: [Z$55]

The objective of the paper is to bring together, within a single holistic framework,
the principle findings of the research into the physical and human aspects a study
in Romwe micro-catchment in southern Zimbabwe. The framework is developed
using Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to identify and model the central aspects
of both physical and human environment (at both the micro and macro scale),
and their impacts on each other. In particular I look at the likely impact of effective
catchment management (here taken to be physical and technical interventions)
on the probability of livelihoods improving. BBNs offer an exciting new way of
bringing together very disparate data sources within useful frameworks, which
could then be used not only for decision making about development needs, but
also to target the next generation of research.

For groundwater, a sizeable improvement in supply can be achieved by moving from
poor to good catchment management under medium rainfall conditions, but not
under poor or good rainfall. For improved surface water and improved soil moisture,
it is particularly under low rainfall conditions that it is worth moving from poor to
good catchment management. It is clear from the results that physical catchment
management on its own is incapable of having a major impact on peoples’ livelihoods
other that within a very narrow range of parameters. The suggestion is that outside
this range, the decision as to whether or not to take a physical catchment
management approach has a negligible impact on water resources and even less
on livelihoods. In relative terms a number of factors both extraneous
(wider economy, underlying ecology) and internal (community cohesion, skills levels )
to the community rank equally or more highly in terms of general impact on
well being.