Conflict and Cooperation Analysis on Transboundary River Basins Using News Media Text Mining Approach

Author(s):  
Liying Guo ◽  
Fuqiang Tian ◽  
Jing Wei ◽  
You Lu

<p>Transboundary water problems are complex systems, which involve interdependence and interconnectedness between elements, uncertainty and feedbacks between processes, and emergence and adaptation through evolution of the systems. There is nearly no way to formulate transboundary water problems in an equation fitting-one-size-for-all. As nature-human coupled systems, transboundary water problems should consider actual stakeholders and parties in context-specific situations as well as natural conditions.</p><p>News media are good recorders for us to have an insight into the transboundary water problems down-to-earth. Local news media are the first-hand and direct reflections of societal values among the riparian countries and stakeholders, and are documentaries of what is going on in transboundary river basins. International news media are also good sources to know about how people in the world perceive transboundary river issues from the perspectives as “outsiders”. Therefore, text analysis of news articles concerning conflict and cooperation on transboundary river basins can tell us a whole story about the past history and on-going “real” life in the basins.</p><p>To uncover the patterns and dynamics of conflictive and cooperative events on a global scale, people usually read news articles, extract information manually in the past, which is tedious and time-commanding. In the era of big data, we collect large news media datasets automatically, and employ machine learning techniques to do data mining out of those news media data. The aim of our research is to minimize manual labor in searching, filtering, reading and understanding the related news media articles by computer, and to provide potent tools for researchers to retrieve useful information  in the related areas. To validate our methodology, we look Mekong River Basin and Brahmaputra River Basin as case studies into details. To apply our methodology in a global scale, we intend to draw a world map with a timeline to show how water conflict, and cooperation occurs, grows, and transforms. By capturing characteristics of the life cycles of water conflict and cooperation, we aim to throw light upon water management in transboundary river basins, provide some hints for water resources decision-makers, and enhance global water security.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liying Guo ◽  
Jing Wei ◽  
Keer Zhang ◽  
Fuqiang Tian

Abstract. Management of transboundary rivers will be one of the great political and environmental challenges of the 21st century if knowledge of conflict and cooperation is not fully developed. Transboundary river conflict and cooperation are critical for the sustainable development of river basins, regional security, and stability, and have significant scientific and practical implications. The construction of a dataset of transboundary water events – individual conflictive or cooperative interaction between riparian –provides important data support and factual basis for the study of transboundary rivers. However, the most representative research, the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, is built by means of manual reading for information extraction, thus difficult for fast updating, also does not cover the global changes in the past decade. This research aims to build a methodological framework for news media datasets tracking of conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers, provide mass of relevant data for the research of transboundary rivers in the globe, prepare a potent research toolkit, lay a solid foundation for further data mining research, and better suit the big data age. In order to test the effectiveness of the methodological framework and toolkit for dataset construction, this research analyses the word frequency and themes of the articles in datasets. The results show that the datasets built by this framework can reflect comprehensive themes of transboundary water conflict and cooperation. Through the analysis of media activity in different river basins, it is possible to get a global overview of the participation of countries located within and outside of the basin in transboundary water issues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose M. Gonzalez ◽  
Evgenii S. Matrosov ◽  
Emmanuel Obuobie ◽  
Marloes Mul ◽  
Laetitia Pettinotti ◽  
...  

New dams impact downstream ecosystems and water infrastructure; without cooperative and adaptive management, negative impacts can manifest. In large complex transboundary river basins without well codified operating rules and extensive historical data, it can be difficult to assess the benefits of cooperating, in particular in relation to new dams. This constitutes a barrier to harmonious development of river basins and could contribute to water conflict. This study proposes a generalised framework to assess the benefits of cooperation on the management of new dams in water resource systems that do not have formal sharing arrangements. Benefits are estimated via multi-criteria comparison of historical reservoir operations (usually relatively uncooperative) vs. adopting new cooperative rules which would achieve the best results for riparian countries as evaluated by a water resources simulator and its performance metrics. The approach is applied to the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam (PMD), which is being built in Ghana in the Volta river basin. The PMD could impact downstream ecosystems and infrastructure in Ghana and could itself be impacted by how the existing upstream Bagre Dam is managed in Burkina Faso. Results show that with cooperation Ghana and Burkina Faso could both increase energy production although some ecosystem services loss would need to be mitigated. The study confirms that cooperative rules achieve higher overall benefits compared to seeking benefits only for individual dams or countries.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloé Meyer

This map presents 286 transboundary river basins (2016) and 592 transboundary aquifers (2015). 154 countries share river basins or aquifers with one or more of their neighbours. Some of this countries (30) lie entirely within one or more transboundary basins, making this shared resource a essential one. The extent of those transboundary resources highlights the importance for countries to cooperate with each other for the sound management of shared waters. Basin Groundwater Transboundary


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyede Simin Mirhashemi Dehkordi ◽  
◽  
Hojjat Mianabadi ◽  

Abstract In the last century, water conflicts have increased in many parts of the world for reasons such as a strong desire for rapid development and poor governance. The impact of these conflicts on various sectors of society such as economic, political and legal subsystems has led researchers to focus on providing solutions and practical methods to deal with water conflicts. Game theory is one of the most common methods used by researchers to manage water conflicts and water allocation in shared and transboundary river basins. Despite the special place of game theory in reductionist sciences, the application of this theory to dealing with conflicts in complex water systems faces challenges. Whereas, the critique of the effectiveness of the game theory method in water conflict management has been neglected. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the capacity to apply the game theory to deal with water conflicts. In order to achieve this purpose, while using library resources, the basics of game theory and the capacity to apply it in the management of water conflicts are analyzed. The results reveal that following the theory of rational choice and rationalism in the game theory method has led to ignore many dimensions and factors affecting the water conflict formation and the way to deal with complex water conflicts. Keywords: Water Conflicts, Game Theory, Peacebuilding, Shared and Transboundary River Basins


Author(s):  
Zhiying Shao ◽  
Fengping Wu ◽  
Fang Li ◽  
Yue Zhao ◽  
Xia Xu

With the rapid development of social economy and global climate warming, scarce transboundary water resources, as one of the basic resources for socio-economic development, have increasingly become the focus of basin countries. To investigate the socio-economic impacts of different water diversion quantity from transboundary river basins, we used a system dynamics (SD) model to reflect interactions between population, water resources, and socio-economic development, and applied it to a case study in Xinjiang to simulate its change tendency from 2011 to 2030 from the temporal dimension. Then, four water diversion quantity of transboundary river basins and four alternative socio-economic development patterns were designed to comprehensively evaluate these impacts of water diversion quantity change on the socio-economy of the region along the river under different socio-economic development patterns. The results indicate that (1) there was a positive correlation between water diversion quantity and the economic output value of the region along transboundary river basins, and the marginal benefit of transboundary water resources would decrease gradually; (2) considering the difficulty of water diversion from transboundary river basins and the protection of downstream water use and ecological health of transboundary river basins, we believe that increasing the transboundary water resources by 20% was more conducive to the sustainable development of Xinjiang’s socio-economy; (3) through the comparison of dynamic evolutions of socio-economic development and water impacts under four socio-economic development patterns, it is best for Xinjiang to plan its future development in the coordinated development of economic-resource scenario. Following this scenario, not only would the total output value of the socio-economy be better than other scenarios, but this also helps to alleviate the contradiction between the water supply and demand, which expected there would be a water shortage of 1.04 billion m3 in 2029 under 20% increase in water diversion quantity. Therefore, appropriate water diversion quantity, reasonable adjustment of industrial production growth rate, reduction of water consumption quotas of different industries and domestic water quota, and improvement of collection and treatment rate for sewage should be given priority in water resources management decision-making in Xinjiang or other arid regions along transboundary river basins.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
jing wei ◽  
Mohammad Ghoreishi ◽  
Felipe Souza ◽  
You Lu ◽  
Fuqiang Tian

<p>Transboundary river basins share a complex network of environmental, economic, political, social and security interdependencies. Consequently, transboundary river systems are characterized by evolving conflict and cooperation dynamics between riparian states. The current literature on transboundary watersheds does not identify the key feedback loops between interconnected political, cultural, institutional and socioeconomic factors. This work compares sociohydrological models of three transboundary rivers (Nile River, Columbia River, and Lancang-Mekong River) with distinct characteristics in terms of hydrological processes and socioeconomic conditions. Conflict/cooperation dynamics within these three models were found to be driven by hydrological regime, economic benefits, power imbalance and institutional capacity. By comparing the contextual factors of the emergent conflict/cooperation dynamics across these three river basins, our synthesis study aims to present a general framework that explains how conflict/cooperation dynamics emerge from the interaction between human and hydrological systems.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 1250002 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIM HANG PHAM DO ◽  
ARIEL DINAR ◽  
DAENE MCKINNEY

Managing transboundary river basins is never easy and usually involves conflicts. This paper introduces a special class of games with externalities and issue linkage to promote cooperation on transboundary water resources. The paper analyzes whether issue linkages can be used as a form of negotiations on sharing benefits and mitigating conflicts. It is shown that whenever opportunities for linkages exist, countries may indeed contribute towards cooperation. In particular, if the linked games are convex, the grand coalition is the only optimal level of social welfare.


Author(s):  
Phimthong Kouangpalath ◽  
Karen Meijer

AbstractThe construction of hydropower plants on transboundary rivers is seldom done with equal benefits to all riparians, and therefore presents coordination and cooperation challenges. Without a supra-national authority in charge of transboundary river basins, coordination between sectors (water, energy and environment) and cooperation between countries largely depends on willingness of the individual nation states and the power relations between these countries. This paper discusses how the interests and relative power positions of actors in transboundary water management shape the outcomes, and what roles are played by River Basin Organisations and foreign investors (especially in hydropower development). These issues are illustrated with examples from the Mekong river in Southeast Asia (Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam), the Euphrates-Tigris (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait) and the Çoruh in Turkey and Georgia.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document