Zambezi River Basin

Background & Objectives

The Zambezi is one of the major river basins in Africa, well endowed with water and land resources, as well as other natural resources. Hydropower and irrigation are considered important means of economic development in the basin. However, investments in those sectors may potentially result in tradeoffs among economic and environmental objectives. IIASA developed an integrated nexus model that links state-of-the-art hydrological, hydro-economic, land use, crop growth, and water quality modules. This model enables a detailed representation of water, food, energy, and environmental systems.

Zambezi River Basin Team

Please click on the picture of each team member for their bio& contact information.

Taher Kahil, Ph.D.

Dr. Kahil is the group leader of the Water Security Research Group at IIASA. Dr. Kahil joined IIASA as a research scholar in September 2015. His research interests are in the areas of integrated biophysical economic modeling for basin-scale water policy analysis, the economics of water allocation and water quality, and evaluation of adaptation policy interventions to global changes in water and agriculture. Dr. Kahil leads the development of the large-scale hydro-economic modeling framework (ECHO). He has published over 40 publications including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and policy briefs

Reetik Sahu, Ph.D.

Dr. Sahu is a postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Water Security Research Group at IIASA. He is part of developing the large-scale hydro-economic modeling framework (ECHO). He obtained his Ph.D. in computational sciences and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in 2018. Prior to IIASA, he also did a two-year postdoc at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (USA) developing data-driven surrogate models for groundwater management using machine learning. His research focuses on developing an optimization framework for multi-agent water resource management problems using different computational, data-driven, and game theory techniques.