Resolving Conflicts between Irrigation Agriculture and Ecohydrology Using Many-Objective Robust Decision Making
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Volume 146, Issue 9
Abstract
In arid regions, sustainable groundwater management is crucial for the protection of vulnerable local ecosystems but often leads to conflict with the interests of economic development. Management models containing simulation-optimization techniques are widely used to explore sustainable strategies of conjunctive water use, but previous studies often failed to address the system’s complexity as a whole, characterized by many stakeholders, a heterogeneous flow regime, and uncertain driving forces. This article contributes to a many-objective robust decision-making (MORDM) framework that integrates a state-of-the-art multiobjective optimization algorithm (MOEA) with robustness-based decision analysis to advance the field’s knowledge of conjunctive water use. The framework is applied to the trans-regional Heihe River Basin in China, which is facing a number of consequences of unsustainable water management, jeopardizing the downstream ecosystem and agricultural development in the river’s midreach. Results show that the current water management scheme is unsustainable in two respects: It overexploits groundwater resources locally and it cannot fulfill the minimum ecological outflow target. The baseline can be further improved with optimized solutions, but an unresolvable conflict exists between the required environmental outflow and water demand for the irrigated agriculture scheme under the current policy of inflow-proportional water sharing with the downstream. The robustness assessment highlights the key driving forces and how they shape the robustness of the system under different policies and changing conditions. The case study sheds light on the potential of MORDM to solve complex conjunctive water management problems and shows how it can help to improve understanding of the problem itself.
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Data Availability Statement
The following data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request:
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Codes for conjunctive water management model and robustness assessment
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Calibrated groundwater model of the Heihe midreach
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Hydrological data (annual resolution) of the Heihe midreach
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Historical records of annual agricultural water use in the Heihe midreach
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Monthly observations of hydraulic head at monitoring sites
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GIS files for the Heihe midreach
Acknowledgments
The authors owe special thanks to Xin Li and his team from the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhengxu Lei from the Department of Water Resources, Gaotai County, for the tireless support of this work. The authors are also grateful to Wenpeng Li and his team from the Chinese Geological Survey for providing hydrogeological data for groundwater model construction. Finally, the authors thank Gianni Pedrazzini for his contributions to the groundwater model development. Funding of this research by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation under the project “Rehabilitation and Management Strategy for Over-Pumped Aquifers under a Changing Climate” is gratefully acknowledged.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 9 • September 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 26, 2019
Accepted: Mar 9, 2020
Published online: Jun 17, 2020
Published in print: Sep 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Nov 17, 2020
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