Changing the paradigm: Concept and principles of roads for water

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Understanding the Concept and the Potential of Roads for Water

CHANGING THE PARADIGM: CONCEPT AND PRINCIPLES OF ROADS FOR WATER

These guidelines introduce the concept of Green Roads for Water and Climate Resilience (also called “Green Roads” or “roads for water”). This concept seeks to expand the traditional relationship between roads and water toward a more multisectoral approach aimed at mitigating roads’ impact on the environment and benefiting local communities through better water management.

The core idea of roads for water is therefore that the negative impacts of roads on the surrounding landscape can be inverted, and roads can simultaneously become instruments of beneficial water management and climate resilience. Roads and water are generally seen as enemies, with water responsible for most of the damage to roads, and roads being a major cause of problems such as erosion, waterlogging, flooding, and dust storms. This tension, however, can be reversed. Green Roads for Water and Climate Resilience places roads in the service of water, landscape management, and climate resilience without sacrificing or diminishing their transport functions.

The integrated approach to road and water management proposed in these guidelines aims to deliver triple benefits: to reduce road damage, to reduce land degradation, and to improve the beneficial use of water to enhance community resilience. Precisely because of the close connection between roads, surface hydrology, and subsurface hydrology, adopting the right practices can simultaneously reduce the damage water poses to roads and reduce or even reverse the harms roads pose to water resources, soils, and landscapes. This often means fitting the roads within their natural and anthropomorphic contexts in ways that complement surrounding natural hydrology, ecosystems, landscapes, human settlements, and economic activities. Implementation of the Green Roads for Water concept is anchored in the key principles outlined in box 1.1.

Although water management is already a vital aspect of roads, the traditional approach has mainly focused on the resilience of the road infrastructure, with limited focus on the resilience of the landscape and opportunities to enhance resilience for communities through access to water. A strong case can be made for developing roads to be an integral part of the watersheds and

BOX 1.1

Principles of roads for water

Implementation of the Green Roads for Water concept is anchored in key principles:

• Communities’ and users’ needs should be a central concern in road planning, design, and implementation. This principle requires road agencies and others to collaborate with roadside users to understand their needs during the planning, design, and implementation stages of roads-for-water projects. These discussions must take into consideration all possible alternative water-harvesting mechanisms and the purposes to which the harvested water will be placed.

Gender is an important consideration in this process: in ethiopia it was found that women in poor female-headed households are less equipped to prepare their land for road-water harvesting, for instance, because they lack access to animal traction (demenge et al. 2015). • Implementing Green Roads programs requires collaboration among larger and more diverse groups of government institutions. Changes in road governance that encourage openness to cooperation, multidimensional sustainability, trust, and transparency are vital to undertaking a more open and multidisciplinary approach to road development. Collaboration between road agencies and agencies responsible for agriculture, disaster management, natural resources, or other domains is crucial to leveraging the full benefits of Green

Roads. The task of developing road infrastructure alignments, concepts, and designs that serve multiple objectives beyond transport requires new approaches. A new approach that involves interagency collaboration can ensure multifunctional investment formulation to tackle challenges more effectively. This collaborative approach requires integrated plans and designs, capacity building, and special green funding arrangements

for additional costs. for instance, agricultural agencies or local authorities may need to play a role in establishing agreements to ensure facilities that harvest and store water are maintained by the roadside users. In low-lying areas, road agencies may need to collaborate closely with those responsible for management of disaster risks and with agricultural agencies to maximize the potential for roads to serve flood control, agricultural, irrigation, and transport functions. • Implementing roads-for-water solutions is not necessarily complicated and often requires only basic techniques and manual labor methods. Controlling the speed of runoff, selectively channelizing or dispersing water, and preserving existing watercourses can be achieved through simple, low-cost solutions, implemented by local low-skill workers, and can create employment or microenterprise opportunities. from an engineering point of view, roads-for-water solutions are no more complex than traditional approaches, but they may require greater collaboration between different stakeholders. • Roads-for-water solutions should fit the the landscape and human settlements. different livelihood systems have different water-harvesting demands, and different landscapes interact differently with roads. for instance, in many semiarid areas smallholder and household-scale irrigation supplements rainfed systems. If rainfall is sparse or not timely enough, water harvesting from roads could help during periods of scarcity, or water can be added to the buffer capacity. shallow groundwater extraction and small storage structures could serve this purpose. finally, commercial farming, which usually comes with the expense of high water demands, can be served by medium- to large-scale surface storage such as borrow pits, earth dams, and ponds.

landscapes in which they are situated. such an approach can preserve road infrastructure and reduce the maintenance burden, contributing to infrastructure productivity; reduce roads’ impacts on the environment; and even enable roads to serve as instruments for beneficial water management and sustainability.