This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As countries across Africa face growing pressure over shared water resources, USC water scientists argue that one of the most powerful tools for preventing conflict may be found not at the negotiating table, but in the mathematical models used to understand water itself. Essam Heggy, a research scientist in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and AI's Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder of the USC Water ReUse and Resource Recovery Center, believes African water conflicts are driven less by an absolute lack of water than by uncertainty over how much water will be available during extreme climate conditions like droughts and how that supply may change.
In a new commentary published in Nature Sustainability, Heggy and his co-authors call for greater visibility and support for rigorous, reproducible African water research in major scientific journals. They emphasize that stronger scientific evidence through reproducible modeling could give governments and international organizations a shared foundation for managing transboundary water resources and resolving disputes. This scientific clarity could then become a foundation for diplomacy.
The commentary, titled "African water research beyond the narratives of conflict and scarcity," was led by Heggy, with co-authors Jongeun You, a political scientist at Northern Michigan University; Abotalib Z. Abotalib of Egypt's National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences; Sara S. Fouad, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich; and Mohamed Ramah, a Ph.D. student at the Université Catholique de Louvain.
The piece builds on Heggy's broader research at USC, where he studies water resources and climate change in arid environments using tools including remote sensing and environmental modeling. His work has examined groundwater, drought and extreme flooding across North Africa and the Middle East. Africa contains 63 transboundary river basins that support more than 1 billion people, including the Congo, Niger and Zambezi basins.
The Nile River basin provides a central example of the challenges Heggy describes. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt depend on the river for different, often competing needs, with upstream countries pursuing hydropower development while downstream communities depend on reliable water flows. In previous research, Heggy and his collaborators examined how prolonged drought could affect the operation of major dams and the distribution of water and hydropower resources amid growing hydroclimatic fluctuations across the continent.
However, robust, reproducible research focused on these shared resources remains underrepresented in prominent scientific journals. That gap can have risky consequences. When local, peer-reviewed research is difficult to find in prominent scientific publications, governments may increasingly turn to private consulting firms or interest groups for technical guidance, according to the authors—groups whose priorities or agendas may not always align with the public interest.
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