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Spatial Barriers to Improved Water and Sanitation in Rural Zambia
The Sustainable Development Goals seek to achieve universal, adequate, and equitable access to drinking water and sanitation by the year 2030. Yet, significant and persistent disparities in water and sanitation access exist, with rural and low-income households in Sub-Saharan Africa exhibiting some of the lowest levels. This paper uses household surveys from rural villages in Zambia’s Western Province to identify, highlight, and examine spatial barriers to improved water and sanitation. Most households included in the study area drink unimproved water, including surface water, and either use unimproved sanitation facilities or practice open defecation. Access to improved water sources and improved sanitation in the study area lags behind the rest of rural Zambia. Beyond the distance to urban areas that makes piped water and sanitation expensive, the location of these villages in the Barotse Floodplain necessitates seasonal migration, which creates barriers to universal access to improved water and sanitation.
Journal Article
Risk factors and mitigation measures in public-private water sector partnerships: lessons from the Asutifi North District, Ghana
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are promoted as a practical option for developing countries to meet their water sector infrastructure gaps. Despite their appeal, PPP projects have been described as complex and challenging, and the water sector PPPs are particularly associated with high failure rates. Risk analysis and evaluations have been identified as critical to the success of PPPs. In this paper, we examine an on-going PPP arrangement for piped water supply in the Asutifi North District of Ghana under a Build, Operate, and Transfer arrangement. Safe Water Network will provide the supply systems and transfer ownership to the District Authority at the end of the contract. We reviewed key project documents to ascertain the measures that would minimize the likelihood of risk occurring during the project cycle. Of 11 risk factors, 7 were anticipated in the project documents. We recommend that project documents be reviewed and amended to address the unanticipated risks.
Journal Article
Comparing Tourist and Tour Operator Perceptions of Tourists’ Impacts on the Environment in Tanzania
Tourism accounts for a substantial and increasing portion of the Sub-Saharan African economy. In Tanzania, the number of international tourist arrivals nearly doubled from 2010 to 2018, and many of them participated in nature-based tourism. In addition to the jobs and revenue created by tourism, it has both positive and negative impacts on a place’s environment. For example, it can fund conservation efforts, but it can also lead to deforestation from infrastructure development. This paper focuses on the environmental perceptions of tourists who traveled to Tanzania and tour operators working in the country. Environmental perception assesses an individual’s ability to recognize how they truly view and react to their environment. This study builds on the existing literature on tourist perceptions to compare three aspects of perceptions. First, it compares tourist perceptions of their personal environmental impact to the impacts of other tourists. Second, it compares tourist perceptions of their personal impacts to the perceptions of tour operators. Third, it compares how tourists perceive their behaviors at home to their behaviors while traveling. Using results from online surveys of 47 tourists and 16 tour operators, this study found that tourists attribute negative environmental impacts to others and positive impacts to themselves. It found similar gaps between tourist and tour operator perceptions, with tourists both over and underestimating their impacts compared to operator perceptions. It found that tourists are more proactive at minimizing their environmental impacts at home than away.
Journal Article
Impacts of flooding on drinking water access in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: implications for the Sustainable Development Goals
Floods are the most common type of natural disaster and they impact human health and well-being. In cities such as Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it is the poorest residents who experience the worst impacts from flooding. Yet although the negative effects of floods on drinking water quality are known, there is little empirical evidence on how they affect water access more broadly. This paper uses interviews from Dar es Salaam's Kigogo Ward to understand perceptions of drinking water source changes during floods. It frames these perceptions in the Sustainable Development Goals, which seek to achieve universal and equitable access to water. Results show that households experience flooding both inside and outside the house and that these episodes impact water quality, accessibility, and availability. In particular, floods can increase contamination, force residents to wait to fetch water, and require them to walk through floodwater to reach water sources. Floods also cause them to discard stored drinking water. These results demonstrate the need for additional research on the impacts of floods on water access. This article has been made Open Access thanks to the generous support of a global network of libraries as part of the Knowledge Unlatched Select initiative.
Journal Article
Prey Species Influences Foraging Behaviors: Rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius) Predation on Little Brown Skinks (Scincella lateralis) and Giant Centipedes (Scolopendra viridis)
Predators often evolve specialized behaviors to feed on dangerous prey. Centipedes are widely documented in the diet of viperid snakes, but the behaviors snakes use to consume these dangerous prey have been reported only anecdotally. To determine how prey type influenced snake foraging behaviors, we ran laboratory predation trials using 29 field-captured Pigmy Rattlesnakes (Sistrurus miliarius) with centipedes (Scolopendra viridis) and skinks (Scincella lateralis). In skink trials, Pigmy Rattlesnakes were significantly more likely to engage in sit-and-wait predation than in centipede trials where active pursuit of prey was frequent. Centipedes were struck by snakes in significantly more trials than skinks and the mean length of strikes directed at centipedes was significantly shorter than for the strikes directed at skinks. Strike latency was significantly lower for centipedes than for skinks. The location on the prey's body where the strike was directed did not differ in skink and centipede trials. The mean time from snake strike to last prey locomotion and to prey ingestion were both significantly longer for centipedes. Pigmy Rattlesnakes exhibited several behaviors in centipede trials, including head elevation when approaching prey, that were never observed in skink trials. Centipedes occasionally struck rattlesnakes, but the snakes did not have any apparent injuries. Pigmy Rattlesnakes displayed plasticity in foraging behaviors to effectively prey on centipedes. The implications of centipede consumption in vipers merits increased attention given its occurrence in dozens of species.
Journal Article
Mapping to Support Fine Scale Epidemiological Cholera Investigations: A Case Study of Spatial Video in Haiti
The cartographic challenge in many developing world environments suffering a high disease burden is a lack of granular environmental covariates suitable for modeling disease outcomes. As a result, epidemiological questions, such as how disease diffuses at intra urban scales are extremely difficult to answer. This paper presents a novel geospatial methodology, spatial video, which can be used to collect and map environmental covariates, while also supporting field epidemiology. An example of epidemic cholera in a coastal town of Haiti is used to illustrate the potential of this new method. Water risks from a 2012 spatial video collection are used to guide a 2014 survey, which concurrently included the collection of water samples, two of which resulted in positive lab results “of interest” (bacteriophage specific for clinical cholera strains) to the current cholera situation. By overlaying sample sites on 2012 water risk maps, a further fifteen proposed water sample locations are suggested. These resulted in a third spatial video survey and an additional “of interest” positive water sample. A potential spatial connection between the “of interest” water samples is suggested. The paper concludes with how spatial video can be an integral part of future fine-scale epidemiological investigations for different pathogens.
Journal Article
The Cost of Conservation: The National Wildlife Refuge System
\"Insufficient resources to hire and retain full time staff and conduct management activities in visitor services has forced the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to scale back core operations,\" said Delegate Madeleine Bordello (D-Guam), of the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans, during a September 2008 hearing on the status of the NWRS. The refuge system's Strategic Workforce Planning Report, released in June 2008, notes that between 2001 and 2006, the number of permanent employees in Wildlife and Habitat Management decreased by 4 percent (34 positions), while other divisions such as fire and law enforcement increased their workforces, reflecting current NWRS priorities.
Journal Article
Evaluating local adaptation of a complex phenotype
Theory predicts that predator–prey interactions can generate reciprocal selection pressures on species pairs, which can result in local adaptation, yet the presence and pattern of local adaptation is poorly studied in vertebrate predator–prey systems. Here, we used a reciprocal common garden (laboratory) experimental design involving comparisons between local and foreign populations to determine if local adaptation was present between a generalist predator—the pigmy rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius)—and a co-occurring prey—the squirrel treefrog (Hyla squirella). We conducted toxicity trials using snake venom from two populations separated by 340 km tested on prey from sympatric and allopatric populations, resulting in data from four venom origin–frog origin combinations. We assessed venom effectiveness using two measures (frog mortality at 24 h and time to frog death) and then used regression analyses to look for a signal of local adaptation with either measure. We found evidence for local adaptation for one measure (time to death), but not the other (frog mortality). We argue that in this system, the time to death of a prey item is a more ecologically relevant measure of venom effectiveness than is frog mortality at 24 h. Our results document an example of local adaptation between two interacting vertebrates using a whole-organism assay and a local versus foreign criteria and provide evidence that population-level variation in snake venom is adaptive.
Journal Article
Researching Housing, Water, and Sanitation in the British and Tanzania National Archives
The passage of Britain’s 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act increased the levels of funding for social welfare projects such as housing in its colonies and mandates. This state of the archives article provides an overview of holdings on African housing construction in Dar es Salaam found in the British and Tanzania National Archives. It highlights archival records that outline housing research, official development plans, proposed housing schemes, and the actual results of these schemes. It also discusses some unexpectedly relevant files that were found by broadening search terms. En 1940, le vote, en la Grande-Bretagne, du Colonial Development and Welfare Act augmenta les fonds pour les projets d’allocations sociales de logement dans ses colonies et mandats. Cet article sur l’état des archives offre une vue d’ensemble sur les avoirs liés à la construction de logements en Afrique à Dar es Salaam, enregistés dans les archives nationales de l’Angleterre et de la Tanzanie. Ceci met en lumière les archives qui exposent la recherche sur le logement, les plans officiels de développement, les projets proposés, et les résultats actuels de ces propositions. Cet article examine également certains dossiers étonnamment pertinents découverts en élargissant les termes de la recherche.
Journal Article