Your search found 8 records
1 Ward, F. A.; Lynch, T. P. 1996. Integrated river basin optimization: Modeling economic and hydrologic interdependence. Water Resources Bulletin, 32(6):1127-1138.
River basins ; Stream flow ; Optimization ; Models ; Hydrology ; Reservoirs ; Watershed management ; Water policy ; Economic aspects ; Decision making ; Benefits / USA / New Mexico / Chama River Basin
(Location: IWMI-HQ Call no: P 5385 Record No: H025657)
2 Ward, F. A.; Young, R.; Lacewell, R.; King, J. P.; Frasier, M.; McGuckin, J. T.; DuMars, C.; Booker, J.; Ellis, J.; Srinivasan, R. 2001. Institutional adjustments for coping with prolonged and severe drought in the Rio Grande Basin. Colorado Water Newsletter, June:4-7.
River basins ; Drought ; Water scarcity ; Water demand ; Water delivery ; Water use ; Reservoirs ; Models / USA / Colorado / New Mexico / Texas / Rio Grande Basin
(Location: IWMI-HQ Call no: P 5836 Record No: H028708)
3 Ward, F. A.; Michelsen, A. 2002. The economic value of water in agriculture: Concepts and policy applications. Water Policy, 4(5):423-446.
Irrigation water ; Economic theories ; Decision making ; Water allocation ; Water scarcity ; Water use ; Water policy ; Prices ; Productivity
(Location: IWMI-HQ Call no: PER Record No: H030923)
4 Ward, F. A.; Booker, J. F. 2003. Economic costs and benefits of instream flow protection for endangered species in an international basin. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 39(2):427-440.
Water policy ; Water law ; Stream flow ; River basins ; Water allocation ; Water use ; Economic aspects ; Mathematical models / USA / Rio Grande Basin
(Location: IWMI-HQ Call no: PER Record No: H032060)
5 Ward, F. A.. 2009. Economics in integrated water management. Environmental Modelling and Software, 24(8):948-958.
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H043323)
(0.28 MB)
Integrated basin scale analysis that accurately accounts for the impacts of proposed policies on the environment and society’s economic welfare can comprehensively and consistently inform water resource policies. Cost benefit analysis (CBA) has considerable potential to support water decisions by consistently appraising proposals in terms of society’s total environmental and economic impact in monetary terms. However, the difficulty of correctly applying CBA to environmental programs with complex physical and economic interactions weakens policymakers’ confidence in comprehensive economic assessments at the basin scale. This paper describes and illustrates a method by which costs and benefits can be systematically integrated into an integrated physical, institutional and economic analysis for a river basin. A simple hydroeconomic model is presented. Its size is small enough to build, understand, and interpret with paper and pencil. But its structure is sufficiently flexible to permit expansion for comprehensive policy design that rests on a foundation of a basin’s hydrology, institutional constraints, and economic relations. The use of cost benefit analysis to support environmental policy will always be limited by ethical questions on the distribution of benefits and costs among sectors, income groups, locations, and generations. Nevertheless, hydroeconomic models offer a potential resource to efficiently and consistently integrate hydrologic, economic, and institutional impacts of policy proposals to support basin scale cost-benefit environmental assessments.
6 Habteyes, B. G.; El-bardisy, H. A. E. H.; Amer, S. A.; Schneider, V. R.; Ward, F. A.. 2015. Mutually beneficial and sustainable management of Ethiopian and Egyptian dams in the Nile Basin. Journal of Hydrology, 529:1235-1246. [doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.09.017]
Water management ; Dams ; Sustainability ; Water resources ; International waters ; Irrigated farming ; Water use ; Equity ; Riparian zones ; Water supply ; Reservoir storage ; Models ; Energy generation ; Water power ; Rivers ; Stream flow ; Economic value / Ethiopia / Egypt / Sudan / Nile Basin / High Aswan Dam / Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H047411)
(1.21 MB)
Ongoing pressures from population growth, recurrent drought, climate, urbanization and industrialization in the Nile Basin raise the importance of finding viable measures to adapt to these stresses. Four tributaries of the Eastern Nile Basin contribute to supplies: the Blue Nile (56%), White Nile-Albert (14%), Atbara (15%) and Sobat (15%). Despite much peer reviewed work addressing conflicts on the Nile, none to date has quantitatively examined opportunities for discovering benefit sharing measures that could protect negative impacts on downstream water users resulting from new upstream water storage developments. The contribution of this paper is to examine the potential for mutually beneficial and sustainable benefit sharing measures from the development and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam while protecting baseline flows to the downstream countries including flows into the Egyptian High Aswan Dam. An integrated approach is formulated to bring the hydrology, economics and institutions of the region into a unified framework for policy analysis. A dynamic optimization model is developed and applied to identify the opportunities for Pareto Improving measures to operate these two dams for the four Eastern Nile Basin countries: Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt. Results indicate a possibility for one country to be better off (Ethiopia) and no country to be worse off from a managed operation of these two storage facilities. Still, despite the optimism of our results, considerable diplomatic negotiation among the four riparians will be required to turn potential gains into actual welfare improvements.
7 Jalilov, S.-M.; Keskinen, M.; Varis, O.; Amer, S.; Ward, F. A.. 2016. Managing the water-energy-food nexus: gains and losses from new water development in Amu Darya River Basin. Journal of Hydrology, 539:648-661. [doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.05.071]
Water resources development ; Energy generation ; Water power ; Food security ; Water use ; Hydrology ; Economic value ; Models ; Reservoir operation ; Dams ; River basins ; Crop production ; Farmland / Central Asia / Tajikistan / Afghanistan / Uzbekistan / Turkmenistan / Amu Darya River Basin / Rogun Dam / Vakhsh River / Nurek Reservoir
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H047604)
(1.56 MB)
According to the UN, the population of Central Asia will increase from its current approximately 65 million people to a well over 90 million by the end of this century. Taking this increasing population into consideration, it is impossible to project development strategies without considering three key factors in meeting the demands of a growing population: water, food and energy. Societies will have to choose, for instance, between using land and fertilizer for food production or for bio-based or renewable energy production, and between using fresh water for energy production or for irrigating crops. Thus water, food and energy are inextricably linked and must be considered together as a system. Recently, tensions among the Central Asian countries over the use of water for energy and energy production have increased with the building of Rogun Dam on the Vakhsh River, a tributary of the Amu Darya River. The dam will provide upstream Tajikistan with hydropower, while downstream countries fear it could negatively impact their irrigated agriculture. Despite recent peer reviewed literature on water resources management in Amu Darya Basin, none to date have addressed the interconnection and mutual impacts within water–energy–food systems in face of constructing the Rogun Dam. We examine two potential operation modes of the dam: Energy Mode (ensuring Tajikistan’s hydropower needs) and Irrigation Mode (ensuring water for agriculture downstream). Results show that the Energy Mode could ensure more than double Tajikistan’s energy capacity, but would reduce water availability during the growing season, resulting in an average 37% decline in agricultural benefits in downstream countries. The Irrigation Mode could bring a surplus in agricultural benefits to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in addition an increasing energy benefits in Tajikistan by two fold. However, energy production in the Irrigation Mode would be non-optimally distributed over the seasons resulting in the most of hydropower being produced during the growing season. Neither operation mode provides optimal benefits for all the countries, emphasizing how difficult it is to actually reach a win–win scenario across the water–energy–food security nexus in transboundary river basins.
8 Funk, B.; Amer, S. A.; Ward, F. A.. 2023. Sustainable aquifer management for food security. Agricultural Water Management, 281:108073. (Online first) [doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2022.108073]
Aquifers ; Food security ; Desalination ; Irrigated farming ; Irrigation ; Freshwater ; Groundwater ; Pumping ; Crops ; Water supply ; Evapotranspiration ; Surface water ; Economic development / Kenya / Lodwar / Lotikipi / Merti
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H051795)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377422006205/pdfft?md5=f28b83fc76b50b22b296158dade0a9fc&pid=1-s2.0-S0378377422006205-main.pdf
https://vlibrary.iwmi.org/pdf/H051795.pdf
https://vlibrary.iwmi.org/pdf/H051795.pdf
(1.55 MB) (1.55 MB)
In aquifer-dependent regions, balancing aquifer protection, desalination, economic development, agricultural irrigation, and food security can be better managed through discovery and development of sources of sustainable groundwater pumping. Aquifer desalination for irrigation to protect food security can mitigate pressure on local freshwater aquifers. Despite its importance, little peer reviewed work to date has identified the economic capacity to pay for aquifer desalination for irrigation to mitigate freshwater aquifer drawdown. The novel contribution of this work is the development and application of an innovative method to assess the economic capacity to pay for aquifer desalination for irrigation for a recently discovered large saline aquifer. It develops an original framework to assess the capacity to pay for aquifer desalination, the results of which can help guide policymakers on efficient and sustainable pumping approaches across users, aquifers, and time periods. A mathematical programming model is developed to economically analyze the 200 billion cubic meter Lotikipi Aquifer, discovered in 2013 in northern Kenya using modern remote sensing methods. While initial pumping of the Lotikipi Aquifer was halted due to high groundwater salinity levels, interest remains strong in assessing the economic capacity to pay for groundwater desalination because of its potential role in protecting regional food security generated by aquifer pumping for irrigation. The model is formulated by calibrating optimized pumping patterns in two existing freshwater aquifers to replicate observed historical pumping levels. Based on that exercise, a second model is developed to identify a least cost set of pumping restrictions that return each of three regional aquifers to starting conditions over a seven-year time period. A third model extends the second by adding a constraint of a minimum required level of food grain security supported by irrigation pumping from the aquifer system. Results show that the economic capacity to pay for aquifer desalination for irrigated agriculture lies in the range of $0.08 - $0.18 USD per cubic meter under current economic conditions and desalination technologies available. While this economic capacity to pay is lower than its current cost in most places, the future could be more optimistic. Advances in desalination technology, higher crop prices, technical advance in agriculture, and development of drought-resistant crops can all contribute to a future capacity to economically justify the expense of desalination.
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