https://hdl.handle.net/10388/13531

Eamen, Leila (2021) An integrated water resources management framework for robust decision-making in a transboundary river basin: An inter-regional hydro-economic approach, USASK Harvest - Theses and Dissertations, https://hdl.handle.net/10388/13531

Allocating limited amounts of freshwater among competing uses is challenging, particularly in transboundary river basins and under the impact of climate change and increasing demand for water associated with population growth and economic development. This calls for decision support tools that inform decision-makers about the consequences of their water management strategies and the impacts of changes in water availability due to climate change and socio-economic development. Hydro-economic models have proven to be promising for helping understand these impacts from an economic perspective. These models need to be integrated and capture both features of the water system and the economic interdependencies to be effective in multi-sectoral and multi-regional river basin contexts. Many of the hydro-economic models, however, adhere to either hydrological or administrative boundaries due to the limited availability of hydrological and economic data at relevant temporal and spatial scales. These models usually consist of a detailed representation of either the water or the economic system and a simplified representation of the other system. This is mainly because an integrated model including a detailed representation of both water and economic systems is extremely data-demanding and challenging to develop due to the different resolutions of datasets associated with these models. This dissertation attempts to address this gap by developing an integrated hydro-economic model that encompasses an entire transboundary river basin and consists of detailed water and economic components to inform decision-making about sustainable and robust water allocation. This is accomplished through these main steps: (1) developing an Inter-regional Supply-side Input-Output (ISIO) model incorporating water supply data for the transboundary Saskatchewan River Basin; (2) testing the temporal transferability of the ISIO model for different years in predicting the economic response of the river basin to changes in water availability under different climatic conditions; (3) coupling the ISIO model with a node-link water resources system model (MODSIM) to create an integrated hydro-economic model; (4) applying this integrated hydro-economic model to identify the sectoral and regional vulnerabilities of the river basin to changes in water supply; and (5) comparing the economic outcomes of the integrated hydro-economic model with those coming from an engineering model (the MODSIM model linked to a crop yield function) and the ISIO model. The contribution of this dissertation is developing an integrated hydro-economic model that couples detailed water resources system and inter-regional supply-side input-output models to identify sectoral and regional vulnerabilities of transboundary river basins to changes in water availability. The findings of this research have advanced our understanding of the cross-sectoral and inter-regional distribution of economic impacts of water allocation strategies and other drivers, including climate change and socio-economic development. This research also investigates, for the first time, the performance of supply-side input-output models that include water under different climatic conditions and over several years. This dissertation serves as an example for future integrated hydro-economic modelling attempts, particularly for informing decision-making about sustainable and robust water allocation in multi-sectoral and multi-regional river basins.

https://harvest.usask.ca/bitstreams/12b9cdea-44c8-442c-92b5-72d02aca45d4/download