Planning of Africa’s land/water future: Hard or soft landing?

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, widespread African poverty, famines and rapid population growth generated an urgent need for solution-oriented water research in order to get a basic idea of the water availability and degree of water scarcity of the vast semiarid drylands (Falkenmark 2018), and possible implications for African social-economic development research was focusing on the absence of water in the semi-arid soils, rather than on the water that had in fact infiltrated (Falkenmark and Rockstro¨m 2015).