Dam-Impacted Water–Energy–Food Nexus in Lancang-Mekong River Basin
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 147, Issue 4
Abstract
Dams heavily impact the Lancang-Mekong River, leading to water-use conflicts for hydropower, food production, and ecosystem sustainment. Basin-scale cooperation has been shown to yield incremental benefits; however, understanding of the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus—critical for cooperation and benefit-sharing in transboundary basins—is insufficient. A WEF nexus model for the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB) was developed to investigate the impacts of value preferences from riparian countries, reservoir operation policies, and future dam construction. The analysis shows that the value preferences for hydropower and agriculture significantly influenced the WEF nexus under cooperation. If downstream countries preferred rice production (RP), there was a substantial reduction in hydropower generation (HP) to meet the irrigation demands of RP because reservoirs operate for basin-level optimization under cooperation. Ecological water demands in China and downstream countries are represented by environmental flow constraints and competed with potential HP and potential RP at the basin scale, whereas trade-off relationships among the WEF nexus depended on hydrology. HP and RP benefited from river damming in downstream countries, considering better dam regulation of streamflow. The complex relationships among the WEF nexus highlight the importance of flexible cooperation policies considering various sociohydro conditions in the LMRB; thus, this study’s results can offer real-world preferences.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which led to major improvements of the paper. This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC0404403 and 2016YFA0601603), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91747208 and 51861125102), the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering-Tsinghua [grant number 2019-KY-01], and China Huaneng Group Co., Ltd. Project (HNKJ17-H20).
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 147 • Issue 4 • April 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Mar 10, 2020
Accepted: Oct 9, 2020
Published online: Feb 1, 2021
Published in print: Apr 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Jul 1, 2021
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