I have been collaborating with Sophie Ayling and the World Bank on a Global Water Security and Sanitation Partnership funded grant to Designing a Tank Prioritisation Index for Sri Lanka.
Water storage is crucial for water security in countries with monsoon driven climates. This will become increasingly important in the context of climate change. Sri Lanka has had a network of approximately 23,000 small tanks which date back to the third millennium BC, which create a buffer to mitigate the impact of floods in the monsoon season and of droughts in the non-monsoon period. However, 21 percent of these are currently non-functional or damaged. This research uses a combination of tank survey data and global satellite datasets to design and implement a prioritisation for tank rejuvenation.
Joe Post, a brilliant CASA Urban Spatial Science MSc student whom I have supervised in 2023, also developed the agricultural-dependent population profiling for India, and he uploaded the results on an interactive map that you can see here.
If you’d like to know more, check out this journal paper: Optimising water storage for climate resilience: Geospatial targeting for small tanks rejuvenation in Sri Lanka.