Weighted Bankruptcy Rules and Transboundary Water Resources Allocation

One significant problem of transboundary river basins causing various challenges and disputes throughout the world is that because of increasing water resource variability and consumption, the water demand often exceeds water availability. Hence, one of the main challenges in transboundary river basin management is how to allocate the available...

Socio-hydrologic modeling to understand and mediate the competition for water between agriculture development and environmental health: Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia

Competition for water between humans and ecosystems is set to become a flash point in the coming decades in many parts of the world. An entirely new and comprehensive quantitative framework is needed to establish a holistic understanding of that competition, thereby enabling the development of effective mediation strategies. This paper presents...

Endogenous technological and population change under increasing water scarcity

While the proposed model is a rather simple model of a coupled human–water system, it is shown to be capable of replicating patterns of technological, population, production and consumption per capita changes. The model demonstrates that technological change may indeed ameliorate the effects of increasing water scarcity, but typically it does so...

Endogenous change: On cooperation and water availability in two ancient societies

We propose and test the theory of endogenous change in societal institutions based on historical reconstructions of two ancient civilizations, the Indus and Hohokam, in two water-scarce basins, the Indus Basin in the Indian subcontinent and the lower Colorado Basin in the southwestern United States. In our reconstructions, institutions are...

Socio-hydrologic modeling to understand and mediate the competition for water between agriculture development and environmental health: Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia (discussion paper)

Competition for water between humans and ecosystems is set to become a flash point in the coming decades in many parts of the world. An entirely new and comprehensive quantitative framework is needed to establish a holistic understanding of that competition, thereby enabling the development of effective mediation strategies. This paper presents...

Hydrological model parameter dimensionality is a weak measure of prediction uncertainty (discussion paper)

This paper presents evidence that model prediction uncertainty does not necessarily rise with parameter dimensionality (the number of parameters). Here by prediction we mean future simulation of a variable of interest conditioned on certain future values of input variables. We utilize a relationship between prediction uncertainty, sample size...

Endogenous technological and population change under increasing water scarcity

The ancient civilization in the Indus Valley civilization dispersed under extreme dry conditions; there are indications that the same holds for many other ancient societies. Even contemporary societies, such as the one in Murrumbidgee river basin in Australia, have started to witness a decline in overall population under increasing water...

On hydrological model complexity, its geometrical interpretations and prediction uncertainty

Knowledge of hydrological model complexity can aid selection of an optimal prediction model out of a set of available models. Optimal model selection is formalized as selection of the least complex model out of a subset of models that have lower empirical risk. This may be considered equivalent to minimizing an upper bound on prediction error,...

Quantile hydrologic model selection and model structure deficiency assessment: 2. Applications

Quantile hydrologic model selection and structure deficiency assessment is applied in three case studies. The performance of quantile model selection problem is rigorously evaluated using a model structure on the French Broad river basin data set. The case study shows that quantile model selection encompasses model selection strategies based on...

Quantile hydrologic model selection and model structure deficiency assessment: 1. Theory

A theory for quantile based hydrologic model selection and model structure deficiency assessment is presented. The paper demonstrates that the degree to which a model selection problem is constrained by the model structure (measured by the Lagrange multipliers of the constraints) quantifies structural deficiency. This leads to a formal...

Endogenous change: On cooperation and water in ancient history

We propose and test the theory of endogenous change based on historical reconstructions of two ancient civilizations, Indus and Hohokam, in two water scarce basins, the Indus basin in the Indian subcontinent and the Lower Colorado basin in Southwestern United States. The endogenous institutional change sees changes in institutions as a sequence...

The impact of climate change on crop production in West Africa: An assessment for the Oueme River Basin in Benin

Climate change studies forWest Africa tend to predict a reduced potential for farming that will affect the food security situation of an already impoverished population. However, these studies largely ignore farmers’ adaptations and market adjustments that mitigate predicted negative effects. The paper attempts to fill some of this gap through a...

A parsimonious hydrological model for a data scarce dryland region

Inapplicability of state of the art hydrological models due to scarce data motivates the need for a modeling approach that can be well constrained to available data and still model the dominant processes. Such an approach requires embedded model relationships to be simple and parsimonious in parameters for robust model selection. Simplicity in...