Abel Abrham
student
ARBA MINCH UNIVERSITY Faculty of Architecture And Urban Planing
Ethiopia
Urbanistický design a krajinářství
-General objective The general objective of this study were to assess the overall ecotourism resource potential of lake Chamo waterfront fish market area and… more
Himanshu Sanghani
advisor
KTH Kungliga Tekniska högskolan
India
I strongly believe in structuring and scrutinising the practical approach to draw strategies for… more
It is an interesting project and I like the way you have strategically created eight zones for the site but somehow I feel that the critical potentials of this project were undermined. I agree that the lake is nearly 350 sq.km of area and offers a blend of diversified ecology; however, critical aspects were missed and the solutions failed to provide judicious evaluation. If you had studied key limnological variables you would have realised that water transparency is zero and the amount of suspended solids in the water column are high. Any lake conservation programme should and need to focus on reducing sediment inflow from the catchments into the lake; the ecotourism factor and design parameters would then change. Many scientific studies have shown that the surface runoff has increased from 4.6 to 72.5 mm as well as sediment load rose from 0.26 to 4.21 t/ha due to land-use and land-cover changes, mainly expanding to urbanisation and intensive agriculture. You should have well integrated the land-use and land-cover in your study to manage the water resources and re-define appropriate programmes.
I appreciate the fact that you want to furbish the area with the activities that the users are participating in currently; hence, most of the programmes that you have cited are related to recreation and partly conserving water. But there are no programmes to monitor the quality of water and other functions neither any research facility that would actually attract and maintain ecotourism. There is no deep analysis or study of marine environment/fauna; catfish Bagrus Docmak, Nile Perch, Hippopotamus and Nile Crocodiles. How is your project taking care of that? Whether there are any programmes to conserve or protect the species? The location of the project and the bank is not specified as there is no master plan. This would have been a major attraction for ecotourism. Flooding is an issue as cited by you in your strategies but besides vegetation/agriculture area nothing specific has been mentioned in the project.
I feel in order to cater to three distinct visions of ecotourism, fish-market and management of water-front development you missed out the deeper understanding of the lake, land, land-use and wetland areas. The recommendations that you have suggested partly works but mostly will require a nifty strategy for its implementation as many compartments of modifications either are not considered or/are missing.
But appreciate your efforts in trying to resolve lake-water-front development that demands ecological, social, governance and hydro-logical studies.