About

Jackie King is an aquatic ecologist who was a researcher, lecturer and supervisor of postgraduates at the University of Cape Town for almost four decades. She now owns and runs Water Matters, a water-resource consultancy specialising in integrated flow managementof rivers, and is an internationally-recognised leader in the field. She believes that the social and ecological consequences of the development of river systems should be addressed at the same time and the same level as engineering and economic aspects, so that decision-makers can assess the full spectrum of costs and benefits before making a development decision. In the 1990s she led the early development of methods to do this in South Africa, which resulted in flows for river maintenance being included in the country’s 1998 National Water Act. In 1997, she led the flow assessment for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which resulted in the first recorded recognition globally of the rights of downstream communities to compensation for declining river health. She was global Team Leader of the World Bank advisory group on environmental flows from 2000-2003, and scientific consultant on integrated flow management to the Mekong River Commission from 2002 to 2007. Since 1997 she has also led scientific teams working on environmental flows and river system management for the Pungwe River, Zimbabwe; parts of the Zambezi Basin (Kafue and Luangwa); the Pangani Basin, Tanzania; the Okavango River system (Angola, Namibia, Botswana); and the headwaters of the Indus River system in Pakistan. She has been contracted to do work of a similar nature for the World Commission on Dams, World Bank, IUCN, WWF, and has worked in Taiwan, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, USA, Guatemala, Australia, Mozambique, and the UK. From 2009 to 2014 she acted as scientific advisor to the Government of Pakistan in a dispute with India over the Kishenganga Dam in the Himalayas, and in this respect served as an expert witness at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in August 2012. In 2012 she completed for WWF a plan for setting and implementing Environmental Flows for the entire Zambezi Basin, and between 2013 and 2018 worked with WWF-Zambia and the Zambian government on aspects of this. In 2010 she was first editor and an author of the book Sustainable use of South Africa’s inland waters, which records South Africa’s moves to provide environmental protection measures for aquatic ecosystems. In 2016 she wrote, as part of a team of four, a Good Practice Handbook for World Bank project managers worldwide dealing with downstream releases linked to proposals for hydropower dams. She frequently speaks as a keynote or invited speaker at international conferences, and has more than 100 refereed items in books, international journals and conference proceedings. Her work in South Africa was recognised in the 1990s with a Silver Medal from the Southern African Society of Aquatic Scientists and in 2003 through the government awarding her the national Women in Water Award in the research category. In 2012 she was appointed Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. In 2016 she received the Gold Medal of the Southern African Society of Aquatic Scientists and was the 2016 recipient of WWF-SA’s Living Planet Award. In 2018 she was elected an International Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She is the 2019 Laureate of the Stockholm Water Prize.

Career Type:

Scientist/Researcher/Academic

Organization Type:

Universities and Academia

Expertise Fields/Interests:

• Integrated basin flow management: environmental flow assessments and their use in basin planning of water resources • Ecological functioning and management of whole river systems • River rehabilitation, including flow restoration • Ecology of aquatic invertebrates and their use as bio-indicators • Aquatic biomonitoring • Wetlands: inventory, classification, biodiversity and management

Major Achievements:

Lead developer of the Building Block Methodology (BBM), an holistic method for assessing the environmental flow requirements for regulated rivers. Development through application in real water-resource projects on the following southern African rivers: Lephalala, Berg, Olifants (W. Cape), Olifants (Transvaal), Letaba, Luvuvhu, Komati, Senqu (Lesotho), Mooi, Tugela, Mogalakwen, Koukoedoe, Sabie. In liaison with the SA national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. 1991-1996. The development and use of the BBM in South African water-resource projects led directly to the inclusion of environmental protection (the ecological Reserve of water for ecosystem maintenance) in the country’s 1998 Water Act. This Act was globally seen as one of the most advanced in the world. Co-developer of DRIFT, a scenario-based methodology for environmental flow assessments 1997-2002. DRIFT has a strong socio-economic component for predicting the impacts of changing rivers on rural subsistence users of river resources. It is commonly seen as the most structured, detailed and technically advanced of the environmental flow methodologies, and is now felt to be a step up from the holistic methods as it centres on ecosystem modelling to predict river and social change linked to water management proposals. It is increasingly being applied in developing countries in Africa and Asia. Endorsed by the World Bank, IUCN, FAO, IWMI, UNDP as international good practice. Approved by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague as “an appropriate tool for estimating potential change in the downstream environment” in tranboundary conflicts of the magnitude and complexity of the one under their consideration.