The ORASECOM Joint Basin Surveys (JBS) Project Summary.

Background

The Orange-Senqu River Basin is a multinational river system that is both ecologically and economically critical to the southern Africa region. It spans four countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa. The Orange-Senqu Commission (ORASECOM), which was established under the Revised Southern African Development Community (SADC) Shared Watercourses Protocol in 2000, manages the water resources in the basin.

Water quality and quantity in the basin is degraded by a range of drivers, including poorly managed wastewater, erosion and poor rangeland practices, sand mining, agriculture, industry, mining, domestic pressure and waste, and large impoundments.

Given that appropriate management to mitigate the ongoing freshwater crisis in Southern Africa requires monitoring water quality and freshwater ecosystem health, ORASECOM developed a monitoring programme in 2009 to address the need for basin-wide surveys of aquatic ecosystem health, called the Joint Basin Survey (JBS), which is carried out every five years.

JBS 2

GroundTruth was the project lead on JBS2 (2015). JBS 2 aimed to determine the aquatic ecosystem health of the Orange Senqu River system. This large project involved collaboration with various specialist local and international partners to undertake detailed sampling, analysis, and reporting of various aquatic ecosystem health parameters. The project involved specialist surveys of diatoms, water quality, aquatic invertebrates (SASS5 and MIRAI), vegetation (VEGRAI), fish (FRAI), instream and riparian habitat integrity (IHI), groundwater sampling, and heavy metals. Field sampling involved coordination of teams comprising over 50 experts across four countries within a tight time frame.

A key output of JBS 2 was the development of a Stakeholder Engagement Toolkit (SET) on the Orange-Senqu Basin for educators and other interested parties to download, personalise (if required) and use. Please download the four zipped files (SET Part 1, SET Part 2, SET Part 3 and SET Part 4) and ensure that you extract them all to the same folder in order for the links to work. You can also download an editable version of the entire presentation in 3 parts (Resources 1, Resources 2 and Resources 3) if you wish to personalise any of the documents.

JBS3

GroundTruth co-lead and carried out the third JBS (JBS3) in 2021. The principle objective was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the chemical, physical, and ecological condition of the entire Orange-Senqu River Basin. Compared to JBS2, GroundTruth pioneered that JBS3 included new avenues of monitoring including new toxic organic compounds, radioactivity, macroplastics, microplastics and solid waste pollution, and environmental DNA (eDNA). For JBS3, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), inter-laboratory benchmarking (ILB), groundwater sampling, and stakeholder engagement were also incorporated within the aquatic ecosystem health (AEH) assessment.

Overview of Aquatic Ecosystem Health (AEH) within the Basin

GroundTruth co-lead sampling over three weeks across the entire basin, as well as analysis and reporting of the results. The basin was largely found to be in a fair to poor state (Ecostatus C/D), with relatively little evidence of sites in good condition and virtually no evidence of pristine or natural systems. The Upper Orange-Senqu and Vaal sub-catchments were the most impacted, while the Lower Orange was marginally better. The situation had deteriorated from JBS2 to JBS3. The primary impacts varied somewhat depending on region. The biggest concern was that there was a noticeable increase in the number of sites in very poor condition in JBS3 compared to JBS2.

Recommendations

After the sampling, GroundTruth co-led compilation and analysis of the results, and developed a series of key recommendations for the Commission to improve water and natural resource monitoring and management. These recommendations included:

• Monitoring at significantly higher spatial and temporal resolutions,
• Urgently addressing the growing wastewater crisis across the country,
• Beginning the slow process of improving rangeland and agricultural practices to mitigate severe runoff and erosion impacts,
• Designing and implementing improved, ideally close to natural, flow management regimes throughout the basin,
• Restoring riparian zones to improve ecological health and reduce flood impacts,
• Recommendations for establishing robust and consistent data collection, preparation, analysis, and reporting to ensure all future JBS acquire reliable and comparable data,
• Intervening urgently at critically impacted sites to avoid ecological collapse, and
• Targeted assessment of specific taxa of high health or conservation importance.

Other outputs

The project also included a detailed report on the groundwater within the basin, creation of a ‘coffee-table’ book detailing the project, as well as a video documentary!