Climate change and adaptive land management in southern Africa

Water scarcity is nothing new to the people in arid and semi-arid regions of Southern Africa. For centuries, they have learned to cope with erratic and limited rainfall, droughts, and dry wells. Human adaptability has its limits, however, and these seem to have been reached and exceeded in some places. The pressure on water resources is higher than ever before. Some rural communities are facing particularly severe difficulties managing their water resources sustainably thanks to a growing population, changing climate, or the wish for better standards of living. An excellent example is the Cuvelai- Etosha Basin (CEB; Fig. 1), a transboundary river basin shared almost equally by Angola in the north and Namibia in the south, which is home to approximately 40% of the Namibian population.