Robert M Kalin

University of Strathclyde · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Ensuring access to adequate and equitable sanitation and ending open defecation by 2030 is the focus of Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 (SDG6.2). We evaluated Malawi’s progress towards SDG 6.2 (specifically the goal to end open defecation), presenting the results of a national survey of over 200,000 sanitary facilities and evaluating their managem...

Water is a finite natural resource. Zero Water Day(s) scenarios are challenging people and communities in Europe and worldwide. The public health community must seize the opportunity to prepare for Zero Water Day(s) through strengthening capacity and capability to respond to rapidly emerging emergencies as well as protected crises. Collaboration ac...

Flood risk management is crucial for climate change resilience. The Hadejia River basin is known for severe and frequent floods, which have destroyed houses and farmlands and claimed many lives. This study developed a GIS-based flood risk and vulnerability mapping assessment using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) to outline scenarios that...

Using wastewater accumulating around rural waterpoints to irrigate community gardens, borehole-garden permaculture (BGP) presents a method of sustainable water management. BGP also presents public health benefits through the removal of stagnant water around boreholes, key Malaria breeding grounds, and through providing year-round food to supplement...

This longitudinal flood-relief study assessed the impact of the March 2019 Cyclone Idai flood event on E. coli contamination of hand-pumped boreholes in Mulanje District, Malawi. It established the microbiological water-quality safety of 279 community supplies over three phases, each comprising water-quality survey, rehabilitation and treatment ver...

With the resurgence of water-isotope tracing applications for Integrated Water Resource Management in developing countries, establishing a stable isotopic baseline is necessary. Developing countries, including Malawi, continue to struggle with the generation of consistent and long-term isotopic datasets due to non-existent or inadequate in-country...

Service provision for Afridev handpumps through community management in Malawi is a notable challenge. Essential preventative maintenance is often neglected, and repairs are undertaken on a reactive basis. The costs of major repairs are not recognized at community level and are typically neglected across the lifecycle of infrastructure or left to e...

Concentrations of ambient particulate-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pPAHs) were measured in PM10 samples collected at roadside, industrial and urban background sites in Bangkok between May 2013 and May 2014. The annual average PM10 concentrations were not significantly different between the roadside (56.4 ± 27.3 µg m−3) and industrial (51...

Empirical insights were made into the challenges of supplying water to communities within low-income areas of peri-urban Blantyre, Malawi. A networked public water supply is provided to those without a domestic tap via communal water kiosks managed by community-based Water User Associations (WUAs) under a government mandate. There has been consider...

Hidden hot springs likely impact rural water supplies in Malawi's Rift Valley with excess dissolved fluoride leading to localised endemic severe dental fluorosis. Predicting their occurrence is a challenge; Malawi's groundwater data archive is sporadic and incomplete which prevents the application of standard modelling techniques. A creative altern...

Saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater aquifers is a threat to groundwater quality globally. This study aims to determine the extent of saltwater intrusion into the coastal freshwater aquifer of the Eastern Dahomey Basin (EDB), Nigeria. Groundwater chemistry was sampled and analysed for ionic ratios and interpreted using a hydrochemical facie...

To improve borehole siting for rural water supply, an advanced resistivity method was adapted for developing country use and demonstrated in Malawi. The method was designed to be low cost, developing-country accessible, efficient. It allows single or multiple operators to acquire the multiple vertical electrical soundings (VESs) required that are i...

This study employed stable isotopes of δ 18 O and δ 2 H in conjunction with other hydrological parameters to understand the origin, inferred residence time, and seasonal effect of groundwater in the shallow aquifers of the eastern Dahomey Basin. A total of 230 groundwater samples (97 in the wet season and 133 in the dry season) were collected from...

Fluoride concentrations in Malawi's groundwater are primarily controlled by geogenic sources that are highly variable and may cause a heterogeneous fluoride occurrence and local-to-regional variations in fluorosis health risks posed. Our aim was to address the challenge of developing a national solution to predicting groundwater vulnerability to ge...

Thirty-eight aquifer units are shared between Malawi and its neighbouring countries. It is essential to prioritize those transboundary aquifers that require immediate attention. A methodology of identifying hotspots in the transboundary aquifers of Malawi that may be at risk of depletion or contamination has been developed. There are 11 local-scale...

In the published article [...]

Meeting long-term rural community water supply needs requires diligent geohydrological conceptualisation. Study of Malawi’s Lake Chilwa Basin, including sampling of 330 water points in Phalombe District, enabled assessment of groundwater quality influence upon supply. The control of larger Lake Chilwa paleo-environments on current Basin groundwater...

Study region Malawi. Study focus The adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 in 2016 has triggered countries across the globe to assess and improve management and use of water resources. Monitoring of these resources is becoming increasingly important, and the management of transboundary water resources, in particular groundw...

Consumption of groundwater containing fluoride exceeding World Health Organization (WHO) 1.5 mg/L standard leaves people vulnerable to fluorosis: a vulnerability not well characterised in Malawi. To evaluate geogenic fluoride source and concentration, groundwater fluoride and geology was documented in central Malawi where groundwater supplies are m...

The implementation of handpumps has contributed to increased improved water access. However, ‘universal access’ as the metric for success within Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, potentially conceals fundamental barriers for sustainable services and hinders SDG 6 target success. Tariffs, in the form of household contributions, are the most comm...

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is vital to the future of Malawi and motivates this study’s provision of the first stable isotope baseline characterization of the Shire River Basin (SRB). The SRB drains much of Southern Malawi and receives the sole outflow of Lake Malawi whose catchment extends over much of Central and Northern Malawi...

There are multiple transboundary groundwater bodies shared between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that are currently managed jointly through the EU Water Framework Directive. In 2016 the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and consequently, there are uncertainties regarding the future status of groundwater management betw...

The Niger Delta is the most climate-vulnerable region in Nigeria. Flooding events are recorded annually in settlements along the River Niger and its tributaries, inundating many towns and displacing people from their homes. In this study, climate change impacts from extreme meteorological events over the period 2010-2099 are predicted and analyzed....

This study employed electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) in characterising the shallow groundwater aquifers of Eastern Dahomey basin in southwestern Nigeria to assess the possible occurrence and distribution of saltwater within the aquifers. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), induced polarization (IP) and borehole logging were carried in l...

Selection of a suitable general circulation model (GCM) ensemble is crucial for effective water resource management and reliable climate studies in developing countries with constraint in human and computational resources. A careful selection of a GCM subset by excluding those with limited similarity to the observed climate from the existing pool o...

Local tariffs in the form of household contributions are the primary financial mechanism to fund the maintenance of rural water supplies in Malawi. An investigation was conducted into the tariffs set by rural service providers to sustain drilled boreholes equipped with Afridev handpumps. A binary logistic regression analysis identified significant...

Despite the increasing interest in climate change and water security, research linking climate change and groundwater quality is still at an early stage. This study explores the seasonal effect of the change in biogeochemical process for the redox-sensitive ions and metals Fe 2+ , Mn 2+ , SO 4 2− , and NO 3 − to assess the groundwater quality of th...

Hydro-climatological study is difficult in most of the developing countries due to the paucity of monitoring stations. Gridded climatological data provides an opportunity to extrapolate climate to areas without monitoring stations based on their ability to replicate the Spatio-temporal distribution and variability of observed datasets. Simple corre...

Developing countries such as Malawi require improved access to isotope tracer tools to better characterize and manage water resources threatened by land development, deforestation and climate change. This is the first published study to use an isotope facility developed in Malawi for this purpose, instead of relying upon sample analyses from abroad...

Countries located on the East African Rift System (EARS) are vulnerable to fluoride in their groundwater; a vulnerability for the developing country of Malawi at the southern rift periphery that is not well characterised. Groundwater fluoride occurrence in Malawi is documented here to better understand and manage fluoride risks posed. Available lit...

Most of the coastal aquifers around the world are experiencing a range of levels of salinity elevation resulting from saltwater intrusion. Rapid growth in urbanisation, population and the associated over-abstraction of groundwater has worsened the situation. Mapping intrusion and extent of saltwater coverage or mixing zones is difficult and costly...

This study investigates groundwater discharge to rivers in the Shire River Basin, Malawi, using the base flow index (BFI) approach. The BFI represents the baseflow component of a river and is often used as a proxy indicator of groundwater discharge to a river. The smoothed minima method was applied to river flow data from 15 gauges in the Basin (ra...

The groundwater from shallow coastal aquifers in Nigeria has been reported to be under intense stress resulting from both natural and anthropogenic impacts ranging from saltwater intrusion, effluent-related contamination and pollution to oil spillage, gas flaring, municipal, industries and agriculture. Here we characterised the hydrostratigraphy an...

A robust decision-making tool is needed to meet sustainability challenges and to manage water resources that are under development pressure, water scarcity, and climate change impact. To tackle such challenges, optimization modelling can be employed to explore regional sustainable management scenarios of groundwater exploitation. Multi-objective ma...

Competitive optimization techniques have been developed to address the complexity of integrated water resources management (IWRM) modelling; however, model adaptation due to changing environments is still a challenge. In this paper we employ multi-variable techniques to increase confidence in model-driven decision-making scenarios. Here, water rese...

A holistic Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) model can be difficult to implement and the associated high-dimension optimization problems’ complexity often forces the decision makers to downscale such problems. These challenges however have motivated this research to develop a comprehensive Optimum IWRM approach (OP-IWRM) using a many-obj...

This study investigated how sporadic river datasets could be used to quantify temporal variations in the base flow index (BFI). The BFI represents the baseflow component of river flow which is often used as a proxy indicator for groundwater discharge to a river. The Bua catchment in Malawi was used as a case study, whereby the smoothed minima metho...

The concept of Stranded Assets has been used for nearly 50 years across many sectors, most recently it has been a focus of investment portfolios in light of the possible impacts of climate change. However, to date there has been no in-depth determination of the impact of Stranded Assets for rural water supply, despite international development targ...

The sustainability of rural groundwater supply infrastructure, primarily boreholes fitted with hand pumps, remains a challenge. This study evaluates whether coverage targets set out within the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) inadvertently increased the challenge to sustainably manage water supply infrastructure. Furthermore, the drive towards de...

Around three million premature deaths annually are ascribed to household air pollution (HAP) arising from inefficient burning of biomass and emissions of products of incomplete combustion. The developing-world response has been widespread adoption of improved cookstove (ICS) technologies. This exploratory study evaluates variation in polycyclic aro...

We report the performance of a field-scale permeable reactive barrier (PRB) for the biological treatment of nitrate-contaminated groundwater. The reactive material of the PRB consisted of a mixture of gravel and mulch as a carbon source for denitrifying bacteria. The PRB was equipped with a delivery system that allowed injecting NO3− at controlled...

Water resource system complexity, high-dimension modelling difficulty and computational efficiency challenges often limit decision makers' strategies to combine environmental flow objectives (e.g. water quality, ecosystem) with social flow objectives (e.g. hydropower, water supply and agriculture). Hence, a novel Optimum Social-Environmental Flows...

Effective response to groundwater salinity in the developing world may critically safeguard drinking-water supplies. Groundwater resources throughout rural Africa are exploited by a vast and increasing number of hand-pumped boreholes for community supply. Our research in TA Ngabu (Shire Valley), Southern Malawi aims to: define groundwater-salinity...

Study region Malawi. Study focus Integrated water resource management (IWRM) of transboundary aquifers (TBA’s) is becoming increasingly important. Without adequate and accurate scientific knowledge of their extent and characteristics, uninformed policy creation could lead to unsustainable management of these vital resources. This is particularly i...

Significant need exists in the developing world to transition from occasional groundwater-quality surveys to routinely sampled groundwater-quality network monitoring programmes that provide better safeguard of resources. Networks contribute to the sustainable management of water resources, are integral to Water Safety Plans, and underpin delivery o...

Local-scale opportunities to address challenges of the water-food nexus in the developing world need to be embraced. Borehole-garden permaculture is advocated as one such opportunity that involves the sustainable use of groundwater spilt at hand-pump operated borehole supplies that is otherwise wasted. Spilt water may also pose health risks when ac...

Parallel global rise in pit-latrine sanitation and groundwater-supply provision is of concern due to the frequent spatial proximity of these activities. Study of such an area in Malawi has allowed understanding of risks posed to groundwater from the recent implementation of a typical developing-country pit-latrine sanitation policy to be gained. Th...

In this study, the Spatial and temporal characteristics of meteorological drought for the period 2011-2099 in Nigeria have been predicted and analysed. Global climate models (GCMs) which are regarded as the most advanced models for estimating future climate change scenarios were used to generate future climate scenarios. Statistical downscaling mod...

Excessive nitrate (NO3⁻) concentration in groundwater raises health and environmental issues that must be addressed by all European Union (EU) member states under the Nitrates Directive and the Water Framework Directive. The identification of NO3⁻ sources is critical to efficiently control or reverse NO3⁻ contamination that affects many aquifers. I...

Rationale Coal tars are a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds that were by‐products from the manufactured gas and coke making industries. The tar compositions varied depending on many factors such as the temperature of production and the type of retort used. For this reason a comprehensive database of the compounds found in different tar typ...

Rationale: Coal tars are a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds that were produced as a by-product from the manufactured gas and coke making industries. The composition of the tar produced varies depending on many factors; these include the temperature of production and the type of retort used. As different production processes produce diffe...

Rationale: Coal tars are a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds and were by-products from the manufactured gas and coke making industries. Different manufacturing processes have resulted in the production of distinctly different tar compositions. This study presents a comprehensive database of compounds produced using two-dimensional gas chr...

Creosote is a distillation product of coal tar and is widely used as wood preservative for railway sleepers, utility poles and for other applications. Creosote can have potentially negative effects on the environment and many of the components are toxic. This study presents the analysis of a Creosote sample from a former wood impregnation plant loc...