THE IMPERATIVE OF WATER GOVERNANCE, BERESA RIVER BANK LANDSCAPE AND MULTI-PURPOSE DAM DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: (A case of Debre Berhan Town)

Abstract

Sustainable waterfront development is about creating a vision for an area and then deploying the skills and resources to realize it after involving a dialogue with the customer within an area. The development of waterfront shapes communities around the water bodies and reflects the ability of the town to altered economic and social circumstances. This paper presents a case study on Debre Berhan town specifically on Beresa River waterfront development of 70m buffer zone from the center line of a river with 105 Ha area wide starting from upper to lower streams. The river has multiple purposes to the local community which includes small farming, fishing, animal drinking, washing and recreation. But, In the study area, the existing waterfront development of Beresa River is not developing in line with the population growth and the town as well. Moreover, flooding, water depletion, conflicts among water users, fresh water scarcity and pollution are the major security threats in the river catchment. Accordingly, the water has a non potential to make a town as a cultural and heritage hub. Therefore, every tourist that came to the town will not pass the river because of undeveloped river sides in a beautiful way and attracts more people to visit the place and that increase the revenue is low, too. A detail data was gathered related to waterfront development of Beresa River for each respective thematic area using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Accordingly, a suitable dam site was selected using geospatial tools and the river waterfront landscape also designed. The method used based on consideration of seven criteria which included topographic factors (slope), geological factors, soil type, catchment size, and land cover, proximity to river and proximity to roads. Each factor was standardized to a common measurement scale so that the results represent numeric range giving higher values to more suitable and lower values to less suitable attributes. Moreover, Flood inundation analysis using software HEC-RAS was applied to obtain the flooding capacity of Beresa river which might cause damaging physical event, phenomenon that may cause the loss of life or injury, property damage, environmental degradation, social and economic disruption. The final suitability map of the study area shows that from the total area, 0.53ha (0.01%) was mapped in most suitable, 0.35ha (0.01%) in more suitable, 1.32ha (0.02%) in suitable, 0.33ha (0.01%) in less suitable and 5708.47ha (99.96 %) unsuitable for dam site selection and construction. The paper concludes some recommendations to develop Beresa waterfront development based on the principles that are collected from the theoretical study in order to well design a waterfront responded to the wishes of the community.