{"id":1424770,"date":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=626246"},"modified":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T09:00:00","slug":"green-roads-are-plowing-ahead-buffering-drought-and-floods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/03\/green-roads-are-plowing-ahead-buffering-drought-and-floods\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Green roads\u2019 are plowing ahead, buffering drought and floods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This story was originally published by\u00a0Yale E360<\/a> and is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makueni County, a corner of southern Kenya that\u2019s home to nearly a million people, is a land of extremes. Nine months a year, Makueni is a hardened, sun-scorched place where crops struggle and plumes of orange dust billow from dirt roads. Twice yearly, though, the county is battered by weeks of torrential rain, which drown farm fields and transform roads into impassable morasses. \u201cWater,\u201d says Michael Maluki, a Makueni County engineer, \u201cis the enemy of roads.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maluki\u2019s axiom is true the world over: Where roads and water intersect, trouble follows. Roads cut off streams and bleed sediment; meanwhile, floods often erode roadbeds into muddy gullies. Although wealthy nations are far from immune, these problems are most severe in developing countries, where roads are largely unpaved and thus especially vulnerable to obliteration. In Kenya and other nations, the issue is exacerbated by climate change, which has amplified the intensity of seasonal monsoons and droughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Maluki began to ponder how to reconcile two of his county\u2019s challenges: the aridity of its dry season and the destructiveness of its wet season. That year, he and colleagues attended a local workshop led by a Dutch consulting firm called MetaMeta on the concept of \u201cGreen Roads for Water\u201d \u2014 a set of precepts for designing roads to capture water through strategic channels, culverts, and ponds and divert it for agricultural use. Inspired by the session, Maluki brought the idea to his colleagues and local farmers, who gave Green Roads their cautious blessing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makueni County\u2019s Green Roads quickly proved their worth. Along roadsides, Maluki\u2019s team members installed \u201cmitre drains,\u201d which shunted floodwaters into newly dug channels that irrigated mangoes, bananas, and oranges. They excavated farm ponds, which stored the rainy season\u2019s floodwaters for use during drought, and they planted roadside fruit trees to absorb runoff and help control the dust that billowed from unpaved roads. And where travel routes crossed ephemeral rivers at right angles, the county built drifts \u2014 concrete road segments that also functioned as makeshift dams. During seasonal floods, the drifts captured deep banks of sand on their upstream sides. The sand retained pockets of water, which farmers tapped during the dry season via four-foot-deep wells dug upstream of the drift. In neighboring Kitui County, one study found that every $400 spent on similar low-tech tweaks increased farmers\u2019 yields by around $1,000; according to Maluki, they\u2019ve also made the rainy season far less damaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A tree-lined road in Bangladesh. Trees block dust, reduce erosion, and absorb runoff.\n Andrew Zakharenka<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe biggest asset for [the county government] in this program is the reduction of maintenance costs,\u201d Maluki says. \u201cIt\u2019s a two-way benefit.\u201d He estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of the counties\u2019 roads now apply water-harvesting principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Southern Kenya isn\u2019t the only place seeing such gains: Nearly 20 countries have either implemented Green Roads for Water or plan to begin soon, and thousands of kilometers of roads, worldwide, have already received Green Roads interventions. Engineers who have taken MetaMeta\u2019s trainings have employed its tenets in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and the concept is rapidly spreading to places as diverse as Somaliland, Tajikistan, and Bolivia. The idea has also gained a toehold at the World Bank and other international lending institutions, which are currently financing a road-building boom that promises to reshape ecosystems and communities around the world. Green Roads for Water offers one potential path through this thicket of new construction, one that repositions roads as environmental assets as well as liabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy integrating these small and easy practices, you can have very big benefits,\u201d says Anastasia Deligianni, manager of MetaMeta\u2019s Green Roads for Water program. \u201cWe think this is a critical moment to really do it right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Green Roads for Water is the brainchild of Frank Van Steenbergen, a Dutch geographer and MetaMeta\u2019s director. While working on irrigation projects in Pakistan in the early 1990s, van Steenbergen first encountered \u201cgabarbands,\u201d stone terraces likely built by farmers millenia ago to capture water and soil from seasonal rivers during monsoons. The gabarbands were proto-dams, but their sinuous paths across ancient streambeds also reminded van Steenbergen of roads, which tend to gather water along their surfaces. In the years that followed, he began to wonder: Why not use roads to direct and collect water in desirable locations, rather than undesirable ones?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea\u2019s first major test occurred in the Ethiopian state of Tigray. Every year, the region\u2019s farmers take part in a weeks-long volunteer restoration effort known as \u201cmass mobilization,\u201d rebuilding terraces and clearing irrigation canals. In 2015, the mobilization included the application of Green Roads principles. Among other measures, Ethiopian farmers dug new trenches and ponds and installed \u201cfloodwater spreaders\u201d \u2014 low earthen berms that channeled road runoff into adjacent fields of maize, wheat, and barley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Low stone barriers built to channel runoff into cropland in Tigray, Ethiopia.\n Courtesy of MetaMeta<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The results, says Kifle Woldearegay, a geoengineer at Ethiopia\u2019s Mekelle University, were dramatic. By 2018, so much water had infiltrated the soil around Tigray\u2019s Green Roads that the water table had risen around two meters, improving the productivity of adjacent farms by 35 percent. Woldearegay has estimated that Tigray\u2019s efforts produced nearly $17,000<\/a> in agricultural and infrastructural benefits for every kilometer of road the state treated \u2014 around a fourfold yield on the government\u2019s investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFarmers were very happy,\u201d Woldearegay says. \u201cThey see that moisture is retained in their farmlands and landscapes, and that their crops are performing better.\u201d Today, he says, practically every road in Tigray has been retrofitted with at least some water-harvesting techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buoyed by their success in Ethiopia, van Steenbergen and a growing network of collaborators have refined the precepts of Green Roads for Water. The techniques tend to be astonishingly simple. Gentle earthen ridges called crossbars guide water off roads and toward irrigation ditches. \u201cBorrow pits\u201d left after the excavation of gravel can be repurposed as rainwater collection ponds. In Bangladesh, engineers have deployed gated culverts to channel floodwaters into rice paddies. \u201cIt is often very non-glorious things that make the difference,\u201d van Steenbergen says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although MetaMeta coined the term \u201cGreen Roads for Water,\u201d van Steenbergen is adamant that no single entity owns the concept. MetaMeta holds no patents nor licenses any technologies; it merely conducts trainings and assessments, and it offers technical guidance to road-building agencies. Many of the techniques it promulgates were developed by local engineers and farmers: for example, an Ethiopian drain design that might also apply to Yemen, or a Pakistani culvert with relevance in Tajikistan. \u201cPeople are very creative,\u201d says van Steenbergen. \u201cThese are all things that can be easily replicated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Green Roads practices have cohered, the concept has garnered institutional support. The German NGO Welthungerhilfe has\u00a0funded<\/a>\u00a0Green Roads trainings and construction in Somaliland; the Global Resilience Partnership has funded assessments in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nepal; and the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United Nations World Food Programme have organized events on the topic. In 2021, the World Bank hired MetaMeta to compile a set of\u00a0guidelines<\/a>\u00a0delineating the principles of Green Roads for Water and highlighting successful case studies. The approach, says Kulwinder Singh Rao, the World Bank\u2019s lead transport specialist, \u201coffers a new way of thinking\u201d about the relationship between roads and water. \u201cPractitioners and policymakers in the road sector need to embrace this new concept.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Trees block dust that billows from an unpaved road in Makueni, Kenya. \n Courtesy of Makueni County<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Green Roads movement is expanding in an era of unprecedented road construction in developing nations. William Laurance<\/a>, an ecologist at James Cook University, has dubbed<\/a> the phenomenon an \u201cInfrastructure Tsunami\u201d \u2014 a wave of construction that could produce more than 15 million miles of paved roads by mid-century and tens of millions of miles of unpaved roads. This exploding transportation network may produce immense benefits for human welfare. \u201cOnce there is a road, there is everything,\u201d says Saroj Yakami, an engineer who spearheads the Green Roads movement in Nepal, where thousands of road miles<\/a> have been constructed since 2015. \u201cYou can go to the hospital easily. You can get government services quickly. You can take your produce to the market.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet this enhanced connectivity often comes at a high social and ecological price. In the Amazon, Laurance has\u00a0found<\/a>, the vast majority of deforestation occurs near roadways; in Nepal\u2019s Chitwan National Park, researchers have\u00a0cautioned<\/a>\u00a0that roads stand to \u201ccause dramatic reductions in tiger numbers\u201d over the next two decades. According to Yakami, shoddily bulldozed Himalayan roads often leave behind wedges of spoil, which absorb water and trigger devastating landslides. \u201cThey\u2019re taking roads everywhere, and that is not good for the environment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some cases, roads provide benefits and costs simultaneously. According to Yakami, new Nepalese roads have cut off mountain springs that have long sustained farms and households, but they\u2019ve also revealed long-buried springs. Left to flow, the unearthed springs turn dirt roads into unstable slicks of mud. But channeled<\/a> into taps and pipes, they can become important water sources for drought-stressed villages. This approach differs from Green Roads strategies in Ethiopia or Kenya, where roads have primarily been modified to capture rainfall rather than groundwater, but it similarly tries to synchronize road design with water delivery infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if roads can be recast as boons for water provision, will that framing provide a perverse incentive to build more of them? The very notion that a road can be \u201cgreen\u201d seems oxymoronic: A vast body of scientific literature demonstrates that roads befoul air and water, fragment ecosystems, introduce non-native species, and obliterate wildlife. In an email, Laurance expressed worry that \u201cwater harvesting might become a driver of road expansion in arid environments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deligianni doesn\u2019t dismiss those fears outright, but she doesn\u2019t give them much credence. For one thing, most Green Roads for Water techniques have thus far been applied as retrofits to existing roads, rather than included in new ones. For another, she says, new roads are inevitable and, in many cases, desirable to local communities. So why not optimize the construction to come? \u201cWe\u2019re looking at the projections for the future, and so many roads are going to be built,\u201d Deligianni says. \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to change the narrative and add some benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now, the Green Roads movement, for all its institutional momentum, is moving forward in fits and starts. The idea, says the World Bank\u2019s Singh Rao, requires \u201ca paradigm shift in thinking and practice,\u201d one that entails cooperation across agencies that tend to be siloed. In Ethiopia, Woldearegay says that agricultural ministries are enthusiastic about Green Roads and have incorporated them into their own technical guidelines, but road departments themselves have proved reluctant. \u201cThey don\u2019t want the costs associated with designing and implementing [them],\u201d he says. That\u2019s the case in Kenya\u2019s Makueni County, where limited budgets have hampered progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet these projects continue to attract attention: In recent months, Michael Maluki has given Green Roads tours to newspaper reporters, engineers, and farmers from neighboring counties. \u201cWe have been receiving so many visitors,\u201d Maluki says. \u201cThe small things we do here, people are noticing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline \u2018Green roads\u2019 are plowing ahead, buffering drought and floods<\/a> on Jan 3, 2024.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the developing world witnesses a boom in road building, a movement to retrofit existing roads is gathering steam. Using embankments, channels, and dikes, so-called \u201cgreen roads\u201d help control floods, harvest excess water for use in irrigation, and slash maintenance costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31739,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[450],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31739"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1424771,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424770\/revisions\/1424771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}