Edmund C. Merem
Ph.D., Department of Urban and
Regional Planning, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS, USA.
edmund.c.merem@jsums.edu


Yaw A. Twumasi
Ph.D., Center for Hydrology,
Soil Climatology, and Remote Sensing. Department of Plant and Soil Science. Alabama A&M
University, Normal, AL, USA
yaw.twumasi@aamu.edu

In the Sub-Saharan African region of River Niger Basin, where none of the major rivers is fully contained within the borders of a single nation, transnational water sharing is essential for survival. Even the globally proclaimed goals of sustainability and environmental security are unattainable in the absence of bilaterally negotiated water agreements.

Yet the systematic study of the nature, conduct of conflict, and cooperation between states over shared water resources in troubled areas of the Middle East continues to dominate the literature with minimal coverage of the Sub-Saharan Africa experience and the role of GIS and remote sensing in monitoring the problem. Considering the intense ecosystem stress inflicted on River Niger by human activities and natural forces emanating from upstream and downstream nations. Researching the growing potential for acute conflict and the need for negotiated water sharing agreements and environmental cooperation among nations of River Niger Basin with the latest advances in spatial information technology as a decision support tool not only helps in averting conflicts, but it has the potentials to bring nations much closer through information exchange. From a geopolitical standpoint, the nature of hydropolitics embodies the complex arenas of interactions between states that share river basins. While this complexity remains compounded due to the depletion of nationally available water resources, the lack of hydropolitical cooperation extracts socioeconomic, political and environmental costs from all players. This is essential as the Niger Basin nations move towards a multi-national watershed management as a conduit for sustainability and equity.

This paper uses GIS and remote sensing technologies in the analysis of hydropolitics of West Africa by focusing on the River Niger Basin with emphasis on the issues and the nature of water politics. Other aspects of the paper cover a regional case study of the River Niger Basin highlighting environmental analysis in Nigeria, Niger and Mali and efforts towards multinational water sharing. The paper has four objectives. The first aim is to update the literature on multinational sharing of water. The second objective is to analyze the current issues in transnational water management. The third objective is to apply the latest methods and advances in geospatial technologies in the study of hydropolitics. The fourth and last objective focuses on the design of geospatial decision support tools in the management of shared waters in arid environments of West Africa. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section highlights the methods. The second section presents the results of environmental and hydrological analysis of the trends in the three selected nations of the Niger Basin. Section three focuses on the remediation efforts while section four discuses the findings and some recommendations. The last section outlines a summary of the paper and the future of geo spatial analysis of the hydropolitics of the river Niger basin