Impacts of Mining in the Upper Zambezi River Basin: An Overview of the Zambian Copperbelt

The Zambezi River Basin (ZRB) is the largest river basin in Southern Africa, covering some 1.37 million square kilometers across eight countries: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is home to approximately 30 million people who rely on the river for drinking water, fisheries, irrigation, hydropower production, mining and industry, ecosystem maintenance, and other uses such as tourism at Victoria Falls and wildlife viewing along the river banks. Water management in the basin is especially difficult because there are multiple countries with multiple and competing interests; competing issues other than water that demand time, attention, and money; inadequate basin-level institutional structures; institutional, legal, economic, and human resource constraints within each country; and poor data collection, poor communication, and inadequate training. However, Zambia has a lion's share of the basin with 105.2km³/ac of water resources covering 75% of the country of a total area of 752,614 sq. km.