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KEEPING GREAT RIVERS GREAT

Barbara Eckman* describes a project that is helping professionals, businesses and local communities understand better their relationship with the River Yangtze and Paraguay-Parana River Basin.

When it comes to the environment, every action seems to have a highly visible consequence. Rivers form a vital value chain connecting activities upstream and down. They provide water for drinking and irrigation, for bottling and food processing. They provide breeding grounds for fish that feed the food chain, and habitats for wildlife. River ecosystems serve as powerful engines supporting natural, industrial and economic life.

A unique technology grant initiative between IBM and the Nature Conservancy will empower non-profit resource managers and policy makers with knowledge typically  available only to scientists and researchers. Insights from the conservation group, combined with technology from IBM, will make it possible for resource managers and policy makers to assess the impact of proposed land use choices on rivers. The current focus for this project is on two of the greatest rivers in the world - the Paraguay-Paraná River Basin in Brazil and the Yangtze in China.

The river as a value chain

Consider the following example: a farmer in China wants to increase acreage under cultivation by 50 percent so that he can supply a new food processing plant being built along the Yangtze River. To get approval from the local agricultural board he needs to provide assurances that run-off from fertilisers will not impact adversely urban areas downstream.

In the Great Rivers Project, IBM and the Nature Conservancy are developing a decision support system to enable the farmer to assess the impact of the additional acreage and crop types. The farmer will provide data on fertilisers and other resources needed. Those numbers will be crunched using underlying models already validated by scientists. The system will then render a three-dimensional visualisation of the environmental impact of water quality and river dynamics on the people, fish stock and wildlife who share this vital resource. This process will be simple and straightforward for both the farmers inputting the data and the decision-makers interpreting it.   Unlike most existing modelling frameworks, the decision support system will integrate a wide variety of models, including water balance, water quality, carbon balance and crop production. 

Downstream from the farmer, the plant manager of a proposed food processing facility will be able to use the new tool as well. The plant depends on water for washing and steaming vegetables, and will be affected by the farmer's agricultural run-off. In turn, wastewater from the plant will affect cities further downstream. Using the decision support system, the plant manager will also be able to visualise the impact of effluents expected from new operations. The plant manager and the farmer, part of a common supply chain, will be able to access each other's simulations to understand impact levels and variables. Both will be able to show the results to the regional planning board, the council on fisheries and water quality officials.  Negotiation of desired plans and permits, based on the simulated scenarios, can then take place between informed stakeholders.

The Great Rivers Project is an example of how IBM is using high-capacity computing to help make complex environmental information transparent to non-scientists. With scientific models established and verified, farmers, businesses,  policy makers and resource managers will all be able to visualise outcomes, collaborate and make appropriate resource decisions.

Open information for collaboration

The new system will provide access to wide-ranging data such as temperature, precipitation, soils, topography, land cover and vegetation for the river basins under investigation. It will serve as a tool for creating operational plans and demonstrating their sustainability.
In the spirit of open sourcing, those who use the tool will make their simulations  available openly on the internet so that others can benefit from their work.  With a collaborative online environment, users will be able to review the parameters and results of simulations already executed on the system, tag those simulations with key words, leave comments, and chat in real time.

The human body can survive only a few days without fresh water. Farmers and food processing plants, also dependent on the river ecosystems, are vulnerable to the same environmental forces. The Great Rivers Project will provide a powerful tool for making policy decisions affecting the world's increasingly scarce, and irreplaceable, water resources. It will enable land use managers, and anyone who desires to take ownership of their actions in support of the environment, to work together to conserve natural river environments - and the fresh water they provide. Future versions will provide a powerful tool to inform businesses as they contemplate investments in developed and developing areas.

In short, the Great Rivers Project will empower policy makers and everyone with a stake in our greatest resource to assess, and act on, the trade-offs between progress and preservation.

*Barbara Eckman is Senior Technical Staff Member, Great Rivers Project at IBM Academy of Technology.