Associates

Jacqueline "Jackie" King, Ph.D; MSAIEES

Jackie King is a freshwater ecologist and Principal Research Officer in the Freshwater Research Unit, University of Cape Town, South Africa, with 30 years of research experience on the rivers of southern Africa.

For the last 17 years she has specialised in the science of integrated flow management (instream flows; environmental flows), which addresses the integrated management of river health and water-resource development. In 1990 she developed, with colleagues in South Africa and Australia, the concept of holistic flow assessments. This concept proposed three major advances in the management of rivers targeted for water-resource development: 1) that all major non-living and living parts of the river ecosystem, from source to sea and from the lowest channel to the highest flood level, constitute the unit to be managed; 2) that the full spectrum of high and low flows, and their temporal and spatial variability, constitute the flows to be managed, and 3) that the social, ecological and economic consequences of the development of rivers can be predicted and quantified, thus allowing decision-makers to assess the full spectrum of costs and benefits before making a development decision. She led the development of environmental flow methodologies for South Africa, which resulted in their inclusion in the country?s new post-apartheid Water Act of 1998, now seen as one of the most advanced and innovative water laws in the world. She also led the flow assessment for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in southern Africa, which included the first attempt globally to quantify the full costs, as well as the benefits, of proposed dams and resulted in that country developing an environmental flow policy to guide operation of the LHWP dams. This work is now used by the World Bank as a good-practice guide.

She was a member and then Team Leader of the World Bank advisory group on environmental flows from 2000-2003, and resigned from that position to take up one as a scientific consultant on integrated flow management to the Mekong River Commission (representing the governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam). She is also presently leading a project on flow management and capacity building for the Pangani Basin, Tanzania (IUCN funded) and is advisor on a project for the Blue Nile, Ethiopia (funded by the International Water Management Institute) and one in South Africa on development of a method to assess the environmental water requirements of ephemeral rivers. She plays or has recently played additional advisory roles or run training workshops in England, Taiwan, Australia, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

She teaches at undergraduate and graduate level at the University of Cape Town, supervises post-graduate theses, and developed and taught a module in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) taught M.Sc. course in Integrated Water Basin Management, as well as running several major water research projects. Those projects presently running address 1) habitat requirements and movement of large, migratory endemic fish species in rivers and the implications for dam design and operation; 2) the impact of alien invasive vegetation on native riparian plant communities; 3) the relationship between flow, periphyton and nutrient status in foothill rivers, and 4) the nature and significance of river and catchment signatures.

She serves on three international committees, including as a Forum Member of the UNEP Dams and Development Project until its closure in 2007. She frequently speaks as a keynote or invited speaker at international conferences, and has more than 80 refereed items in books, international journals and conference proceedings, including nine major technical research reports. 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.