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Summary Ongoing pressures from population growth, recurrent drought, climate, urbanization and industrialization in the Nile Basin raise the importance of finding viable measures to adapt to these stresses. Four tributaries of the Eastern Nile Basin contribute to supplies: the Blue Nile (56%), White Nile-Albert (14%), Atbara (15%) and Sobat (15%). Despite much peer reviewed work addressing conflicts on the Nile, none to date has quantitatively examined opportunities for discovering benefit sharing measures that could protect negative impacts on downstream water users resulting from new upstream water storage developments. The contribution of this paper is to examine the potential for mutually beneficial and sustainable benefit sharing measures from the development and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam while protecting baseline flows to the downstream countries including flows into the Egyptian High Aswan Dam. An integrated approach is formulated to bring the hydrology, economics and institutions of the region into a unified framework for policy analysis. A dynamic optimization model is developed and applied to identify the opportunities for Pareto Improving measures to operate these two dams for the four Eastern Nile Basin countries: Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt. Results indicate a possibility for one country to be better off (Ethiopia) and no country to be worse off from a managed operation of these two storage facilities. Still, despite the optimism of our results, considerable diplomatic negotiation among the four riparians will be required to turn potential gains into actual welfare improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation and evolution of parabolic aeolian dunes depend on vegetation, and as such are particularly sensitive to changes in environmental controls (e.g., temperature, precipitation, and wind regime) as well as to human disturbances (e.g., grazing, agriculture, and recreation). Parabolic dunes can develop from the stabilisation of highly mobile barchan dunes and transverse dunes as well as from blowouts, as a consequence of colonisation and establishment of vegetation when aeolian sand transport is reduced and/or when water stress is relieved (by increasing precipitation, for instance). Conversely, existing parabolic dunes can be activated and may be transformed into barchan dunes and/or transverse dunes when vegetation suffers environmental or anthropogenic stresses. Predicted increases in temperature and drought severity in various regions raise concerns that dune activation and transformations may intensify, and this intensification would have far-reaching implications for environmental, social, and economic sustainability. To date, a broad examination of the development of parabolic dunes and their related transformations across a variety of climate gradients has been absent. This paper reviews existing literature, compares data on the morphology and development of parabolic dunes in a comprehensive global inventory, and scrutinises the mechanisms of different dune transformations and the eco-geomorphic interactions involved. This knowledge is then integrated into a conceptual framework to facilitate understanding and prediction of potential aeolian dune transformations induced by changes in environmental controls and human activities. This conceptual framework can aid judicious land management policies for better adaptations to climatic changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]