Game theory and water resources

Journal of Water and Climate Change

The combined effects of climate change and growing water demand due to population growth, industrial and agricultural developments cause an increase in water scarcity and the subsequent environmental crisis in river basins, which results in conflicts over the property rights and allocation agreements. Thus, an integrated, sustainable and efficient water allocation considering changes in water resources due to climate change and change of users' demands is necessary. In this study, the drainage basin of Zarinehrood was chosen to evaluate the function of selective methods. Assessing climate change impact scenarios of the Fifth IPCC reports, e.g., RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5, have been used. For downscaling outputs of GCMs an artificial neural network (ANN) and for bias correction a quantile mapping (QM) method have been used. Using a bargaining game and the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) with two methods, one symmetric and two AHP methods, the water available for users was a...

Water

The Eastern Nile Basin is facing a number of transboundary issues, including water resources development, and the associated impacts. The Nile Basin, particularly the Eastern Nile Sub-basin, is considered as one of a few international river systems of potential conflicts between riparian countries. The Eastern Nile is characterized by the high dependency of downstream countries on river water generated in upstream countries, with limited or no contribution to the runoff itself. The aim of this paper is to analyze optimal scenarios for water resources management in the Eastern Nile with regard to hydropower generation and irrigation development. A hydro-economic optimization model based on Genetic Algorithm has been used to determine the maximum benefits for two scenarios: (i) non-cooperative management of hydraulic infrastructure by the riparian countries (status quo), and (ii) cooperative water resources management among the riparian countries. The hydro-economic model is developed using a Genetic Algorithm and deterministic optimization approach covering all hydraulic infrastructures in the Eastern Nile, existing and planned, including the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The results show that cooperative management yields an increase in hydro-energy returns for all countries compared to the status quo, with a very high increase in Ethiopian's returns, as expected. Non-cooperative system management would negatively impact the hydro-energy of Egypt compared to the cooperative management (reduced by 11%), without a significant increase of hydro-energy for Ethiopia. For Sudan, the results show that hydropower generation benefits from the presence of GERD, in both management scenarios. Non-cooperative management of the system, along with the internal trade-off between irrigation and hydropower facilities, would negatively impact irrigation supply in Sudan. The findings support the argument of positive impact of GERD development on the three Eastern Nile riparian countries, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, provided that the three countries agree to manage the system cooperatively.

Journal of Industrial Engineering International, 2015

Oil and gas as the non-renewable resources are considered very valuable for the countries with petroleum economics. These resources are not only diffused equally around the world, but also they are common in some places which their neighbors often come into conflicts. Consequently, it is vital for those countries to manage their resource utilization. Lately, game theory was applied in conflict resolution of common resources, such as water, which is a proof of its efficacy and capability. This paper models the conflicts between Iran and its neighbors namely Qatar and Iraq between their oil and gas common resources using game theory approach. In other words, the future of these countries will be introduced and analyzed by some well-known 2 9 2 games to achieve a better perspective of their conflicts. Because of information inadequacy of the players, in addition to Nash Stability, various solution concepts are used based on the foresight, disimprovements, and knowledge of preferences. The results of mathematical models show how the countries could take a reasonable strategy to exploit their common resources.

Water

This paper focuses on regional integration through the lenses of the Water–Food–Energy (WEF) nexus, a concept putting strong emphasis on cross-sectoral and multi-level interactions as well as on resource interdependencies. There is an extensive amount of published research focusing on the Aral Sea basin. In this paper, the authors build upon these different contributions and provide a meta-analysis of the literature of WEF nexus opportunities in Central Asia (CA) countries. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions regarding how the WEF Nexus can represent an opportunity for reinforced collaboration regarding resources management. To do so, focusing on existing literature, this paper first (1) explores how the nexus can be a relevant instrument for regional integration. Second (2), it provides an overview of water, food, energy conditions and challenges in the Aral Sea basin in particular. Third (3), synthesizing existing research, the authors identify critical variables to be c...

Physical Review E

Numerous empirical studies show that when people play social dilemma games in the laboratory they often cooperate conditionally, and the frequency of conditional cooperators differs between communities. However, this has not yet been fullyexplained by social dilemma models in structured populations. Here we model a population as a two-layer multiplex network, where the two layers represent economic and social interactions respectively. Players play a conditional public goods game on the economic layer, their donations to the public good dependent on the donations of their neighbours, and player strategies evolve through a combination of payoff comparison and social influence. We find that both conditional cooperation and social influence lead to increased cooperation in the public goods game, with social influence being the dominant factor. Cooperation is more prevalent both because conditional cooperators are less easily exploited by free-riders than unconditional cooperators, and also because social influence tends to preserve strategies over time. Interestingly the choice of social imitation rule does not appear to be important: it is rather the separation of strategy imitation from payoff comparison that matters. Our results highlight the importance of social influence in maintaining cooperative behaviour across populations, and suggest that social behaviour is more important than economic incentives for the maintenance of cooperation.

Water Policy

The question of how to govern and manage transboundary river basin for competing and often conflicting demands due to limited supplies continues to be an issue of concern, conflict, and cooperation. A key novelty of this paper is the use of the Water Diplomacy Framework (WDF) to address supply-demand mismatch using the notion of collaborative problem-solving and joint fact-finding. It builds on innovative applications of game-theoretic approaches and uses equity and sustainability as guiding principles to address the supply-demand mismatch. Five different bankruptcy methods (net benefit ranges between US$17,462M to US$18,201M) and the Nash Bargaining Solution (net benefit ranges between US$18,132M to US$19,216M) are used to resolve supply-demand mismatch in the Indus basin among four provinces within Pakistan. The maximum total benefit generated from the Nash Bargaining Solution is 5.5% higher compared to the best bankruptcy method. Moving from the non-cooperative and rule-based ban...

PLOS ONE, 2015

So far many optimization models based on Nash Bargaining Theory associated with reservoir operation have been developed. Most of them have aimed to provide practical and efficient solutions for water allocation in order to alleviate conflicts among water users. These models can be discussed from two viewpoints: (i) having a discrete nature; and (ii) working on an annual basis. Although discrete dynamic game models provide appropriate reservoir operator policies, their discretization of variables increases the run time and causes dimensionality problems. In this study, two monthly based non-discrete optimization models based on the Nash Bargaining Solution are developed for a reservoir system. In the first model, based on constrained state formulation, the first and second moments (mean and variance) of the state variable (water level in the reservoir) is calculated. Using moment equations as the constraint, the long-term utility of the reservoir manager and water users are optimized. The second model is a dynamic approach structured based on continuous state Markov decision models. The corresponding solution based on the collocation method is structured for a reservoir system. In this model, the reward function is defined based on the Nash Bargaining Solution. Indeed, it is used to yield equilibrium in every proper subgame, thereby satisfying the Markov perfect equilibrium. Both approaches are applicable for water allocation in arid and semi-arid regions. A case study was carried out at the Zayandeh-Rud river basin located in central Iran to identify the effectiveness of the presented methods. The results are compared with the results of an annual form of dynamic game, a classical stochastic dynamic programming model (e.g. Bayesian Stochastic Dynamic Programming model, BSDP), and a discrete stochastic dynamic game model (PSDNG). By comparing the results of alternative methods, it is shown that both models are capable of tackling conflict issues in water allocation in situations of water scarcity properly. Also, comparing the annual dynamic game models, the presented models result in superior results in practice. Furthermore, unlike discrete dynamic game models, the presented models can significantly reduce the runtime thereby avoiding dimensionality problems.

PloS one, 2017

Conflicts over water resources can be highly dynamic and complex due to the various factors which can affect such systems, including economic, engineering, social, hydrologic, environmental and even political, as well as the inherent uncertainty involved in many of these factors. Furthermore, the conflicting behavior, preferences and goals of stakeholders can often make such conflicts even more challenging. While many game models, both cooperative and non-cooperative, have been suggested to deal with problems over utilizing and sharing water resources, most of these are based on a static viewpoint of demand points during optimization procedures. Moreover, such models are usually developed for a single reservoir system, and so are not really suitable for application to an integrated decision support system involving more than one reservoir. This paper outlines a coupled simulation-optimization modeling method based on a combination of system dynamics (SD) and game theory (GT). The me...

Scientific Reports

What do corruption, resource overexploitation, climate inaction, vaccine hesitancy, traffic congestion, and even cancer metastasis have in common? All these socioeconomic and sociobiological phenomena are known as social dilemmas because they embody in one form or another a fundamental conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest. A shortcut to the resolution of social dilemmas has thus far been reserved solely for highly stylised cases reducible to dyadic games (e.g., the Prisoner’s Dilemma), whose nature and outcome coalesce in the concept of dilemma strength. We show that a social efficiency deficit, measuring an actor’s potential gain in utility or fitness by switching from an evolutionary equilibrium to a social optimum, generalises dilemma strength irrespective of the underlying social dilemma’s complexity. We progressively build from the simplicity of dyadic games for which the social efficiency deficit and dilemma strength are mathematical duals...

Sustainability

Since prehistoric times, water conflicts have occurred as a result of a wide range of tensions and/or violence, which have rarely taken the form of traditional warfare waged over water resources alone. Instead, water has historically been a (re)source of tension and a factor in conflicts that start for other reasons. In some cases, water was used directly as a weapon through its ability to cause damage through deprivation or erosion or water resources of enemy populations and their armies. However, water conflicts, both past and present, arise for several reasons; including territorial disputes, fight for resources, and strategic advantage. The main reasons of water conflicts are usually delimitation of boundaries, waterlogging (e.g., dams and lakes), diversion of rivers flow, running water, food, and political distresses. In recent decades, the number of human casualties caused by water conflicts is more than that of natural disasters, indicating the importance of emerging trends o...

PLOS ONE, 2015

Rapid reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is required to mitigate disastrous impacts of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol introduced international emissions trading (IET) to accelerate the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions. The IET controls CO 2 emissions through the allocation of marketable emission permits to sovereign countries. The costs for acquiring additional permits provide buyers with an incentive to reduce their CO 2 emissions. However, permit price has declined to a low level during the first commitment period (CP1). The downward trend in permit price is attributed to deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol: weak compliance enforcement, the generous allocation of permits to transition economies (hot air), and the withdrawal of the US. These deficiencies created a buyer's market dominated by price-making buyers. In this paper, I develop a coalitional game of the IET, and demonstrate that permit buyers have dominant bargaining power. In my model, called cooperative emissions trading (CET) game, a buyer purchases permits from sellers only if the buyer forms a coalition with the sellers. Permit price is determined by bargaining among the coalition members. I evaluated the demand-side and supply-side bargaining power (DBP and SBP) using Shapley value, and obtained the following results: (1) Permit price is given by the product of the buyer's willingness-to-pay and the SBP (= 1 − DBP). (2) The DBP is greater than or equal to the SBP. These results indicate that buyers can suppress permit price to low levels through bargaining. The deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol enhance the DBP, and contribute to the demand-side dominance in the international permit market.

Scientific Reports

Nature-based tourism (NBT) is vulnerable to a rapid increase in visitors because natural resources are often open access. Market failure caused by over-exploitation of natural resources is an example of social dilemmas in common-pool resource systems. Game theory, which describes people’s decision making under conflicts, has been applied to the analysis of social dilemmas in NBT. However, previous studies use non-cooperative games assuming individualistic players and discuss the emergence of social dilemmas only in a limited situation. Here, we demonstrate, by developing a two-player non-cooperative game of wildlife viewing, that the traditional game-theoretic approach fails to find social dilemmas. By analysing the competition between tour operators (players) with different social value orientations (SVOs), we found that concentration of tours becomes a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium (PINE) when both players are competitive. Whether the wildlife-viewing market is a Prisoner’s ...

Water, 2019

This paper presents the first groundwater-energy-food (GEF) nexus study of Iran's agronomic crops based on national and provincial datasets and firsthand estimates of agricultural groundwater withdrawal. We use agronomic crop production, water withdrawal, and energy consumption data to estimate groundwater withdrawal from electric-powered irrigation wells and examine agronomic productivity in Iran's 31 provinces through the lens of GEF nexus. The ex-post GEF analysis sheds light on some of the root causes of the nation's worsening water shortage problems. Access to highly subsidized water (surface water and groundwater) and energy has been the backbone of agricultural expansion policies in Iran, supporting employment in agrarian communities. Consequently, water use for agronomic crop production has greatly overshot the renewable water supply capacity of the country, making water bankruptcy a serious national security threat. Significant groundwater table decline across the country and increasing energy consumption underscore dysfunctional feedback relations between agricultural water and energy price and groundwater withdrawal in an inefficient agronomic sector. Thus, it is essential to implement holistic policy reforms aimed at reducing agricultural water consumption to alleviate the looming water bankruptcy threats, which can lead to the loss of numerous agricultural jobs in the years to come.

Journal of Environmental Geography, 2016

Integrated Water Cycle Management (IWCM) aims to bring together a diversity of social, environmental, technological and economic aspects to implement sustainable water and land management systems. This paper investigates the challenges and opportunities facing Kazakhstan as it its efforts to move towards a more sustainable approach to managing its finite and highly stressed water resources. The use of a strategic-level risk governance framework to support a multi-disciplinary Kazakh-EU consortium in working collaboratively towards enhancing capacity and capability to address identified challenges is described. With a clear focus on addressing capacity building needs, a strong emphasis is placed on developing taught integrated water cycle management programmes through communication, stakeholder engagement and policy development including appropriate tools for managing the water issues including hydraulic models, GIS-based systems and scenario developments. Conclusions on the benefits...

Water

Peri-urban areas in the global south are experiencing over-exploitation and contamination of water resources as a result of rapid urbanisation. These problems relate to the ineffectiveness of the underlying institutions in this dynamic, multi-actor context. Institutions need to be considered during problem solving; however, peri-urban communities have limited insight into their institutional context. This research examines the extent to which problem solving capacity can be improved through gaming-simulation methods. A game-based approach is tested in a capacity building workshop with peri-urban communities in Khulna (Bangladesh). A role-playing game designed from game theory models is used to examine local drinking water problems through an institutional lens. Workshop evaluation shows that through role-play, participants learned about strategies in drinking water supply (in both the current and future scenarios) and about the potential to address water quality issues through coope...

2021

New dams impact downstream ecosystems and water infrastructure; without cooperative and adaptive management, negative impacts can manifest. In large complex transboundary river basins without well codified operating rules and extensive historical data, it can be difficult to assess the benefits of cooperating, in particular in relation to new dams. This constitutes a barrier to harmonious development of river basins and could contribute to water conflict. This study proposes a generalised framework to assess the benefits of cooperation on the management of new dams in water resource systems that do not have formal sharing arrangements. Benefits are estimated via multi-criteria comparison of historical reservoir operations (usually relatively uncooperative) vs. adopting new cooperative rules which would achieve the best results for riparian countries as evaluated by a water resources simulator and its performance metrics. The approach is applied to the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam (PMD),...

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2014

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner's or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders' utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner's ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades.

Water Resources Research, 2012

Beneficiaries of common pool resources (CPRs) may select available noncooperative and regulatory exogenous institutions for managing the resource, as well as cooperative management institutions. All these institutions may increase the long-term gains, prolong the life of the resource, and help to escape the tragedy of the commons trap. Cooperative game theory approaches can serve as the backbone of cooperative CPR management institutions. This paper formulates and applies several commonly used cooperative game theoretic solution concepts, namely, the core, Nash-Harsanyi, Shapley, and nucleolus. Through a numerical groundwater example, we show how CPR users can share the gains obtained from cooperation in a fair and efficient manner based on these cooperative solution concepts (management institutions). Although, based on their fairness rationales, various cooperative management institutions may suggest different allocations that are potentially acceptable to the users, these allocation solutions may not be stable as some users may find them unfair. This paper discusses how different methods, such as application of the plurality rule and power index, stability index, and propensity to disrupt concepts, can help identify the most stable and likely solutions for enforcing cooperation among the CPR beneficiaries. Furthermore, how the noncooperative managerial characteristics of the CPR users can affect the stability and acceptability of the different cooperative CPR management institutions is discussed, providing valuable policy insights for cooperative CPR management at community levels.

Water Resources Research

We develop a game theoretic model of the role of foresight in games involving users interacting over a public good. Previous research in this area has applied game theory to understand social dilemmas and inform policy initiatives. However, considerations of the "evolving structure" of natural resource games over time and agents' planning horizon raises the complexity of game analysis substantially and has often been overlooked. We analyze a simple model of an irrigation system shared by two users and consider how players will act under different levels of foresight. Without foresight into game changes over time, players are blind to the fact that they are in a game of chicken. We model agents with foresight by interconnecting games across time and show how this creates opportunities for "strategic loss" early on, allowing players with foresight to reduce total costs. High future costs can thus be avoided with foresight if the rising costs of inaction are made apparent. We consider the effect of discounting and differences between players to provide policy recommendations regarding incentives for foresight.

Group Decision and Negotiation

Hydropolitical conflicts between the Eastern Nile countries over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are systematically analyzed at three points in time: just before the announcement of construction by Ethiopia on April 11, 2011, before the negotiations in early January 2014, and late August 2014. Hypergame theory, as developed within the framework of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution for handling misperceptions, is used to gain strategic insights into these conflicts and to ascertain the possible resolutions of the disputes. In all of three conflicts, the key decision makers are Egypt and Sudan, the downstream countries, and Ethiopia, the upstream nation. The findings from the analyses demonstrate the significant utilization of strategic surprise, a decisive act in which a decision maker intentionally exercises a course of action in the dispute that is hidden to its opponents in order to attempt to reach a more desirable outcome for itself. In particular, both Egypt and Sudan were caught by surprise when Ethiopia publicly announced on April 11, 2011 that it was going to build GERD, since no prior notification was given. Because Ethiopia was aware of Egypt and Sudan's misperception this dispute is modeled as a second level hypergame. The conflict investigations also show that the geopolitical and economic changes in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia allowed Ethiopia to construct the dam without any harsh confrontation with Egypt and Sudan. Keywords Conflict resolution • Graph model • Hypergames • Misperceptions • Nile River • The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Water

The socio-hydrology community has been very successful in promoting the need for taking the human factor into account in the mainstream hydrology literature since 2012. However, the interest in studying and modeling human-water systems is not new and pre-existed the post-2012 socio-hydrology. So, it is critical to ask what socio-hydrology has been able to offer that would have been unachievable using the existing methods, tools, and analysis frameworks. Thus far, the socio-hydrology studies show a strong overlap with what has already been in the literature, especially in the water resources systems and coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) areas. Nevertheless, the work in these areas has been generally dismissed by the socio-hydrology literature. This paper overviews some of the general concerns about originality, practicality, and contributions of socio-hydrology. It is argued that while in theory, a common sense about the need for considering humans as an integral component of...

Understanding Risks and Uncertainties in Energy and Climate Policy, 2018

The renewable energy projects involve multiple stakeholders; the social acceptance of these projects may convert into a thoughtful risk for the exploitation of renewable energy. Comprehending the process under which a social license to operate may be granted to a renewable energy project is significant. The "GO" or "NO-GO" decision for a renewable energy project is a vital task. In order to illustrate how renewable energy projects can be assessed from the sustainability point of view, two hypothetical scenarios were constructed. These scenarios describe a conceptual renewable energy project evaluated by five imaginary stakeholders under specific criteria and sustainability pillars. The first scenario is a "NO-GO" scenario: the project is not sustainable due to significant environmental, social, economic, technological and geopolitical negative impacts. In this case, the social license to operate will not be endorsed by the stakeholders; important changes are needed before reassessment. The second scenario is a "GO" scenario: the preferences of the stakeholders are such that the project may be considered sustainable and the social license to operate may be endorsed by the stakeholders. The methodology utilized to assess the two hypothetical scenarios for the same renewable energy project is the multi-criteria decision analysis combined with the multi-attribute utility theory. The quantification of assessment results was conducted with the assistance of a state-ofthe-art decision support system ("Acropolis DSS"), which allows decision-makers to evaluate multiple options that offer alternate solutions in "GO-NO-GO" situations.

Hydrological Sciences Journal

The role of water quality, particularly its impact on health, environment and wider well-being, are rarely acknowledged in the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus. Here we demonstrate the necessity to include water quality within the water dimension of the WEF nexus to address complex and multidisciplinary challenges facing humanity. Firstly, we demonstrate the impact of water quality on the energy and food dimensions of the WEF nexus and vice versa at multiple scales, from households to cities, regions and transboundary basins. Secondly, we use examples to demonstrate how including water quality would have augmented and improved the WEF analysis and its application. Finally, we encourage hydrological scientists to promote relevant water quality research as addressing WEF nexus challenges. To make tangible progress, we propose that analysis of water quality interactions focuses initially on WEF nexus "hotspots," such as cities, semi-arid areas, and areas dependent on groundwater or climate change-threatened meltwater.

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2016

Engagement between investors and corporate boards has been suggested as a pathway to mitigate stranded asset and climate change risks. Debate is ongoing as to whether divestment or active ownership strategies are more appropriate to deliver longterm value and environmental sustainability. The paper tests the effectiveness of owner engagement strategies by studying the conditions for cooperation between investors and their companies. Characteristics of investors and companies are modelled in game theoretic frameworks, informed by semistructured interviews with professionals from the energy and finance industries, and academia, NGO, and regulatory sectors. Conditions for mutual cooperation between investors and companies are characterized as prisoners' dilemmas. A number of parameters are examined for their impact on the development of sustained cooperative equilibria, including: the benefits and costs of cooperation; the degree of strategic foresight; individual discount factors; and mutual history. Challenges in the formation of investor coalitions are characterized and solutions are proposed.

Scientific Reports

The terrestrial phase of the water cycle can be seriously impacted by water management and human water use behavior (e.g., reservoir operation, and irrigation withdrawals). Here we outline a method for assessing water availability in a changing climate, while explicitly considering anthropogenic water demand scenarios and water supply infrastructure designed to cope with climatic extremes. The framework brings a top-down and bottom-up approach to provide localized water assessment based on local water supply infrastructure and projected water demands. When our framework is applied to southeastern Australia we find that, for some combinations of climatic change and water demand, the region could experience water stress similar or worse than the epic Millennium Drought. We show considering only the influence of future climate on water supply, and neglecting future changes in water demand and water storage augmentation might lead to opposing perspectives on future water availability. While human water use can significantly exacerbate climate change impacts on water availability, if managed well, it allows societies to react and adapt to a changing climate. The methodology we present offers a unique avenue for linking climatic and hydrologic processes to water resource supply and demand management and other human interactions. Water resources are sensitive to climate change and variability 1-5 , especially in arid and semi-arid regions 6-8. Regional and global hydrologic models forced with Global climate model simulations have been widely used to assess future changes in water resources 9-11. Water availability is also closely associated with operations of water supply infrastructure (surface water reservoirs and desalination plants, etc.), and human water use behavior (e.g., growth and seasonal cycles in water demands) 12. Some modeling frameworks used for climate/hydrology projections typically simulate the natural hydrologic cycle 13-17 (Fig. 1 (top right)) without considering anthropogenic water demand, human interactions 18, 19 and man-made infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs 20 (Fig. 1(top left)). Storage infrastructure can significantly alter water flow and distribution 21. Man-made surface reservoirs control 22 about 20% of the global annual river discharge (~8000 km 3 out of 40000 km 3 ; ref. 23) and provide resilience against droughts, in addition to their role in water resource management and energy production 24-27. Since early 2000s, several major modeling efforts have tackled integrating water demand, irrigation and other human dimensions in water stress and availability analysis 10, 28-41. Man-made local water supply infrastructure (in particular surface water reservoirs) affects future water availability because it is, generally speaking, built specifically to cope with climatic extremes. A system with distributed and different water storage, and therefore more local resilience, will be less vulnerable to climatic change and variability compared to a system with limited local capacity to cope with extremes. As a result, different regions will see different water availability changes depending on their local infrastructure and capacity to cope with variability or adapt to change. Omitting surface water reservoirs from large-scale water cycle models introduces a large source of uncertainty in current assessments of the global water cycle and hinders evaluation of climate change

Hydrology, 2021

Undertaking integrated and sustainable water resources management (ISWRM) and providing socially acceptable solutions with scientifically solid bases is a dynamic and challenging process. Two basic pillars–umbrellas can be identified in the literature: stakeholder engagement and analysis; and integrated monitoring–modelling in the form of a decision support system (DSS) that can assess, evaluate and rank the management options. This study presents a framework that can be used as a good-practice example of successful stakeholder engagement (public engagement and collaboration with local communities towards shared visions) and an integrated DSS for ISWRM (including characterisation at catchment and local scales, programmes of measures and their evaluation): the Framework for Integrated Land and Landscape Management (FILLM), developed by an Irish multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder platform, the Water Forum. The fundamental theoretical principles and practical aspects of the FILLM...

Water Economics and Policy, 2018

The Kura–Araks Basin is facing problems with insufficient water availability for all needs and poor water quality, which results in high rates of waterborne diseases. The riparians of the basin struggle with management of water resources within their national borders, as well as internationally, across the basin. With international rivers, interdependency among countries is created, where the upstream country can impact the quantity and quality of water downstream. This study focuses on the upstream–downstream relationship with the Kura River between Azerbaijan and Georgia. The analysis uses a game theoretical framework, which incorporates several issues in the negotiation space. Specifically, water quantity and water quality are analyzed separately and combined into an aggregated isolated game. The analysis compares the aggregated isolated game, where the outcome of each game is negotiated separately, with an interconnected game, where the two games are jointly negotiated. Using re...

Sustainability Science, 2022

Action situations"-events, venues, or physically interdependent instances of decision-making-have become a central unit of analysis in the social-environmental sciences, particularly among scholars interested in bridging the social with the biophysical or ecological side of interdependent decisions. A growing body of empirical studies in social-ecological systems research has recently used case and comparative studies to analyse multiple interdependent action situations, structured into networks. In this article, we take stock of this body of empirical research, synthesize the diverse approaches that scholars have taken to assess "networks of action situations", and identify fruitful paths forward. We conduct a systematic review of the empirical literature in the field, reviewing and summarizing the key characteristics of the empirical studies, including network features, topologies, methods, and data sources used in each case. We summarize and discuss the conceptualizations, methods, diagnostic procedures, and conclusions used in this body of work in a narrative framework synthesis. The review indicates that an increasingly coherent approach is taking shape, but a systematic, protocol-driven, or formalized approach is only partly emerging. We derive future research needs that could help accumulate knowledge from empirical research.

Human Ecology

Power relationships, access and control, (in)equity, and (in)justice are key modulators of conflicts arising from ecosystem services between multiple stakeholders. A greater knowledge of stakeholder value systems and behaviors is crucial for understanding socioecological dynamics. We propose an analytical framework that combines political ecology and game theory to analyze water ecosystem services. This integrated framework was used to reinterpret concepts such as common goods, (a)symmetric flows, and (un)fair trade-offs in the context of ecosystem services. The purpose was to gain a better understanding of behaviors and (a)symmetries in power relationships between multiple stakeholders. We studied the case of a north-western Mediterranean river basin using data obtained from stakeholder interviews and newspaper articles. Our findings uncovered different types of stakeholder relationships, ranging from mutual support and cooperation to conflict. The proposed analytical framework sho...

Water Resources Management, 2012

Out-of-context analysis of water resources systems can result in unsustainable management strategies. To address this problem, systems thinking seeks to understand interactions among the subsystems driving a system's overall behavior. System dynamics, a method for operationalizing systems thinking, facilitates holistic understanding of water resources systems, and strategic decision making. The approach also facilitates participatory modeling, and analysis of the system's behavioral trends, essential to sustainable management. The field of water resources has not utilized the full capacity of system dynamics in the thinking phase of integrated water resources studies. We advocate that the thinking phase of modeling applications is critically important, and that system dynamics offers unique qualitative tools that improve understanding of complex problems. Thus, this paper describes the utility of system dynamics for holistic water resources planning and management by illustrating the fundamentals of the approach. Using tangible examples, we provide an overview of Causal Loop and Stock and Flow Diagrams, reference modes of dynamic behavior, and system archetypes to demonstrate the use of these qualitative tools for holistic conceptualization of water resources problems. Finally, we present a summary of the potential benefits as well as caveats of qualitative system dynamics for water resources decision making.

Sustainability, 2021

Conventional water use and management models have mostly emulated purposefully designed water use systems where centralized governance and rule-based cooperation of agents are assumed. However, water use systems, whether actively governed or not, involve multiple, independent decision makers with diverse and often conflicting interests. In the absence of adequate water management institutions to effectively coordinate decision processes on water use, water users’ behaviors are rather likely to be non-cooperative, meaning that actions by individual users generate externalities and lead to sub-optimal water use efficiency. The objective of this review is to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of recently proposed modeling systems dealing with non-cooperative water use regarding their ability to realistically represent the features of complex hydrological and socioeconomic processes and their tractability in terms of modeling tools and computational efficiency. For that purpose, ...

Water

Water is becoming a scarce resource in many parts of the world, leading to increased competition amongst water users. Optimized water allocation is increasingly important to balance the growing demand for water and the limited supply of accessible clean water. The literature on water allocation schemes and decision support systems, developed for application in specific water management areas or watersheds, was critically reviewed. Although the literature is rich in studies on the application of a broad range of water allocation schemes, there is a lack of information available on the methodology and process of selecting the most applicable scheme that balances the local realities and requirements of stakeholders while considering the local context with regard to the economic, social and environmental impact of water usage. In this article, a framework is presented that water management practitioners can use to select applicable water allocation planning schemes and associated decisi...

Journal of Flood Risk Management, 2017

This paper discusses the use of game theory as a method to achieve land and water governance for flood retention and resilience on a catchment scale. Therefore, it addresses flood retention in river catchments by using pay-off matrices of game theory. How do pay-off matrices between upstream and downstream change when certain property rights are adjusted or institutional conditions are changed? What if liability issues, responsibilities, and externalities of flood protection measures are reframed? Who should pay and who profit from retention measures? Individual scenarios correspond to some basic games from the game theory. The aim of these thought experiments is to develop rules for upstreamdownstream agreements on retention and resilience within a river basin area.

Algorithms

Cooperative game theory provides an appropriate framework to assess the likelihood of conflict resolution, encourage cooperation among parties, and determine each party’s share in resource sharing conflicts. In calculating the fair and efficient allocation of the incremental benefits of cooperation, cooperative game theory methods often do not consider the exogenous bargaining powers of the players based on factors, that are external to the game, such as their political, economic, and military powers. This study reformulates three well-known cooperative game theory methods, namely, Nash-Harsanyi, Shapley, and Nucleolus, to account for the exogenous bargaining powers of the players in cooperative games. Using the Caspian Sea international conflict as an example, this paper shows how the negotiators’ exogenous bargaining power can change the outcome of resource sharing games. The proposed weighted cooperative game theory approach can help determine practical resolutions for real-world...

Annals of Operations Research, 2016

In the present paper, a recent deterministic continuum-strategy two-player discrete-time dynamic leader-follower game with fixed finite time duration and closed-loop information structure is studied. The types of the considered payoff functions can be widely used in different applications (mainly in conflicts of consuming a limited resource, where one player, called the leader, is a superior authority choosing a strategy choice first, and another player, called the follower, chooses after). In case of certain payoff convexity, explicit conditions are given, when it can be known in advance that an equilibrium exists and consists of only two possible choices of both players at each step. The sub-game equilibrium from a given step may depend on the former selections of the players. Thus the continuum-strategy problem has been reduced to a general finite game of two possible choices corresponding to both players. Such type of games could be solved in a standard way with dynamic programming using a computer. Nevertheless, the game can be further simplified, and then an equilibrium can be directly determined, such decreasing the computational demand to a great extent. A solution algorithm and practical examples are also given to support the real-life application of the results.

Water

Effective groundwater management and allocation are essential from economic and social points of view due to increasing high-quality water demands. This study presents a review and bibliometric analysis of the popular techniques in groundwater management and allocation models, which have not yet been captured in the literature, as our knowledge allows. To this extent, the literature on this state-of-the-art is categorized based on four primary sectors intervening in efficient groundwater management. The first sector discusses the simulation and surrogate models as the central groundwater predictive models, wherein quantitative and qualitative groundwater models are scrutinized. The second section is dedicated to applying different classic and smart optimization models, followed by a summary of state-of-the-art works on applying accurate and heuristic optimization models in groundwater management. Third, uncertainty analysis techniques in conjunction with groundwater modeling are stu...

Water, 2019

With population numbers increasing and anthropogenic climate change, the amount of available fresh water is declining. This scenario can lead to an increase in the occurrence of water conflicts, especially in transboundary river basins. Prevention strategies to avert water conflicts by designing a fair, efficient, and sustainable water allocation framework are needed. Taking into account the socioeconomic and environmental differences among the riparian countries is one of the most important features an allocation scheme should have. In this article, bankruptcy and bargaining games were used to construct a new weighted water allocation model. The proposed method was applied to allocate the contested water capital of the Mekong River during the dry season. The Mekong River originates in China and flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The results of the allocation showed that, except for China and Vietnam, all the other riparian countries get their full claim o...

Frontiers in Environmental Science

In this article, the bankruptcy theory and bargaining games are used to construct a two-stage water resources allocation negotiation model (TSANM). A Nash-bargaining game model is used for the initial allocation, followed by an adjustment stage which considers factors such as water circumstances, water satisfaction, water risk, and water efficiency. The TSANM systematically considers the multi-dimensional attributes of water resources in the allocation process and may likely increase the participation of riparian countries. The proposed method is applied to allocate the contested water capital of the Tigris-Euphrates River. This gives initial allocation to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq of 30.00%, 22.00%, and 48.00%, respectively, and adjusted allocation of 24.98%, 21.30%, and 53.72%. Through collective bargaining and group negotiation, the stability and acceptability of allocation are effectively improved, absolute egalitarianism and utilitarianism are both avoided, and instead objectivit...

Synthese

Policy and guideline proposals for ethical artificial-intelligence research have proliferated in recent years. These are supposed to guide the socially-responsible development of AI for the common good. However, there typically exist incentives for non-cooperation (i.e., non-adherence to such policies and guidelines); and, these proposals often lack effective mechanisms to enforce their own normative claims. The situation just described constitutes a social dilemma-namely, a situation where no one has an individual incentive to cooperate, though mutual cooperation would lead to the best outcome for all involved. In this paper, we use stochastic evolutionary game dynamics to model this social dilemma in the context of the ethical development of artificial intelligence. This formalism allows us to isolate variables that may be intervened upon, thus providing actionable suggestions for increased cooperation amongst numerous stakeholders in AI. Our results show how stochastic effects can help make cooperation viable in such a scenario. They suggest that coordination for a common good should be attempted in smaller groups in which the cost for cooperation is low, and the perceived risk of failure is high. This provides insight into the conditions under which we should expect such ethics proposals to be successful with regard to their scope, scale, and content.

Journal of Water Supply: Research and Technology-Aqua, 2021

Bankruptcy solution methods are widely used and efficient methods for conflict resolution which attract considerable attention in the area of solving conflicts related to water resources. However, most of the related studies have focused on the use of bankruptcy solution methods in solving quantitative water resources conflicts. In this study, four bankruptcy solution rules including proportional (PRO), constrained equal awards (CEA), constrained equal losses (CEL), and Talmud (TAL) rules were used to develop four models to allocate the allowable pollution loads to pollution sources. One of the novel aspects of the current study is to consider the amount of each flow discharge in addition to the pollution concentration of each pollution source. Evaluation of performances of the selected bankruptcy solution rules in a reach of Karun River in Iran showed that the CEA-based model can be considered as the most desirable option for small pollution sources whereas the CEL-based model seem...

Water Resources Management, 2017

Increasing water consumption via competitive demands has resulted in serious water conflicts and the subsequent environmental crisis in the Gavkhouni Watershed with the Gavkhouni swamp in the most downstream located in the central part of Iran. In this research, a two-player ultimatum game theory approach is adopted to not only address the water conflicts with the purpose of environmental reclamation of the drying swamp, but also to ensure economic satisfaction for the upstream landowners and farmers. The Ministry of Energy (MoE) and its subsidiary regional water authority represent the responsible organizations for providing water while the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is the primary body in charge of water consumption in the watershed. MoE and MoA are considered as two players in the game, whereas MoE has more power than MoA in terms of allocating water. Five strategies are studied namely: 1 and 2) decreasing water allocation to irrigated agriculture as much as the annual shortage of the Gavkhouni swamp with and without compensation to MoA (D-L), 3 and 4) decreasing water allocation to irrigated agriculture twice as much the annual shortage of the swamp with and without compensation for MoA (D-2 L) and 5) giving up Gavkhouni swamp's reclamation plan (D). Moreover, three scenarios regarding the relations between environmental and agricultural utilities are designated. According to the results, D-2 L with paying compensation to MoA is chosen as the best alternative in scenario 1 when the environmental utility was assumed to be greater than the agricultural utility. Ultimatum Game Theory has no final solution for scenarios 2 and 3 where the environmental utility is considered to be equal and smaller than agricultural utility. The swamp's annual environmental water shortage as 324 million cubic meters is supplied by application of both strategies D-L and D-2 L. Ultimatum Games are efficient in assessment of water conflicts to resolve them through careful and planned negotiations.

Environmental Earth Sciences

Groundwater quality (GWQ) monitoring is one of the best environmental objectives due to recent droughts and urban and rural development. Therefore, this study aimed to map GWQ in the central plateau of Iran by validating machine learning algorithms (MLAs) using game theory (GT). On this basis, chemical parameters related to water quality, including K+, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, SO42−, Cl−, HCO3−, pH, TDS, and EC, were interpolated at 39 sampling sites. Then, the random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithms were used in the Python programming language, and the map was plotted concerning GWQ. Borda scoring was used to validate the MLAs, and 39 sample points were prioritized. Based on the results, among the ML algorithms, the RF algorithm with error statistics MAE = 0.261, MSE = 0.111, RMSE = 0.333, and AUC = 0.930 was selected as the most optimal algorithm. Based on the GWQ map created with the RF algorithm, 42.71% of the studied area ...

Water, 2020

Participatory irrigation, where farmers are given greater control and management responsibility, has been a topic of controversy for many years. Initially seen as a panacea for dealing with weaknesses in state-run irrigation, participatory irrigation has generated mixed results, especially in South Asia. Part of the challenge of understanding the conditions that promote and undermine participatory irrigation is that it is seldom deployed in the same way. For example, irrigation fees collected by farmers are not handled in the same manner, even within a single country. In some instances, a large portion of collected monies is retained locally and in others, only a small portion is kept for local use. In this paper, we use game theory to contemplate how the portion of irrigation fees retained locally might impact on the effectiveness of participatory irrigation. We show that there are multiple plausible equilibria, and that allowing farmers to retain more funds locally might shift beh...

Soft Computing, 2022

In real-life decision-making challenges, experts quite frequently have a preference for expressing their perspective in natural linguistic terms rather than definite numerical format. These linguistic representation has been utilized to resolve plenty of decision-making problems. This paper displays the thorough study of matrix games where in the payoffs are characterized through linguistic interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (LIVIFSs). Solution of these matrix games are attained by resolving a duo of linear or nonlinear programming problems, originated through non-linear bi-objective programming problems. Finally, a numerical example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the suggested approach. Keywords matrix games • linguistic variable • intuitionistic fuzzy set • linguistic interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set • average aggregation operator 1 Introduction Zadeh (1965) defined fuzzy sets by employing membership degrees which only expresses the degree of affinity to the fuzzy set, under consideration. The concept of intuitionistic fuzzy sets (I-fuzzy set) was first suggested by Atanassov (1986), by introducing non-membership degrees to fuzzy sets in addition to membership degrees and reports the ambiguous viewpoints not only by degree of membership but also non-membership functions. I-fuzzy sets together with the pair of degree of membership and non-membership of a considered set describes degree of hesitancy/ unreliability. These sets are extensively utilized in many real-life problems such as, Szmidt

Journal of Hydrology, 2023

Droughts can affect a multitude of public and private sectors, with impacts developing slowly over time. While droughts are traditionally quantified in relation to the hydrological components of the water cycle that they affect, this manuscript demonstrates a novel approach to assess future drought conditions through the lens of the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus concept. To this end, a set of standardized drought indices specifically designed to represent different nexus sectors across 50 catchments in Sweden was computed based on an ensemble of past and future climate model simulations. Different patterns in the response of the four nexus sectors water, energy, food and ecosystem services to future climate change emerged, with different response times and drought durations across the sectors. These results offer new insights into the propagation of drought through the WEFE nexus in cold climates. They further suggest that future drought projections can be better geared towards decision makers by basing them on standardized drought indices that were specifically tailored to represent particular nexus sectors.

Land, 2022

Industrial growth and development are among the integral components of economic development in developing countries such as Iran. Markazi province in the central part of Iran is one of the most prone areas for industrial progress due to its geopolitical location, proximity to the capital and major cities, and access via Iran’s western corridor. Over the last few decades, the concentration of major industries in combination with a lack of environmental safeguards have led to major environmental concerns, such that the province’s industrial development faces serious challenges going forward. This paper analyzes how to resolve these challenges through strategic analysis of stakeholder interactions using a Graph Model for Conflict Resolution, i.e., a non-cooperative model of game theory. Results indicate that, from a strategic point of view, the main cause of the conflict is over physical industrial land development in Markazi province by way of rationality and organizational benefits f...

Iranian Journal of Science and Technology-Transactions of Civil Engineering, 2018

In this study, a Pollution Spill Response Management Model (PSRMM) is developed to provide an emergency response on reservoir operation during accidental injection of hazardous material to reservoirs. PSRMM consist of spatial system analyzing (SSA) model, 2D hydrodynamic and water quality simulation model (CE-QUAL-W2), and multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. CE-QUAL-W2 model is applied for spatial and temporal analysis of water body in simulation routine of PSRMM. Also, in an advanced modeling framework, CE-QUAL-W2 is coupled with MOPSO algorithm to obtain desirable near optimal reservoir operation strategy and/or emergency planning in selective withdrawal framework. The simulationoptimization (SO) routine of PSRMM provides pareto optimum reservoir operation strategy in selective scheme to minimize reservoir cleanup time and to reduce the magnitude and frequency of water quality standard violations. The proposed tool is applied in Ilam reservoir in Iran, as a multipurpose hydraulic project providing water for drinking, irrigation, and flood control during an accident spill of conservative hazardous material. Different scenarios are defined and tested employing the proposed PSRMM for managing accidental spill of conservative pollutant into the reservoir.