Indus Water Treaty in the Backdrop of Climate Change and its Consequences

Climate change is the main driving force that shall affect global distribution of water in future. It has already effected water variation in some regions in the world including the Himalayan countries which face rapid decline in water reserves. This climate change-driven water variation is likely to affect transboundary water sharing treaties and agreements, and may force the water sharing nations either to conflict or cooperation policies.

Transboundary Water Resources Conflict Analysis Using Graph Model for Conflict Resolution: A Case Study—Harirud River

One of the most important environmental issues today is the water crisis and the ensuing security challenges. Of these, transboundary waters pose the most significant security challenges. Resolving these conflicts and agreements over transboundary waters has always faced a variety of challenges, making it difficult to reach a mutually agreed solution. One of the transboundary water conflicts that have been exacerbating in recent years is the conflict between Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan over the use of the Harirud river water resources. The present paper aims to analyze, using the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), a game theory model, the conflict between the three countries regarding the utilization of the water resources of the border river, Harirud. To this purpose, first, the current state of the conflict was investigated. Then, each of the three countries’ possible options and preferences was defined according to the past and present state of the conflict as well as the possible states. By defining the permissible movements and priorities of each decision maker, the equilibrium of the conflict was obtained. Next, four scenarios were defined, the equilibria were extracted in each scenario, and the results were interpreted. The implementation of the GMCR model algorithm regarding the Harirud water conflict between the three countries indicated that the current state is the most likely outcome of the conflict as none of the parties involved, given their preferences, and is motivated or able to change their strategy to help the conflict to a more favorable state.

Analysis on Decision-Making Changes of Multilevel Governments and Influencing Factors in Watershed Ecological Compensation

Watershed ecological compensation has been widely accepted as a system to promote the cooperation of various stakeholders to solve the problem of transboundary water pollution, but the existing research does not fully consider the impact of compensation fee paid by different governments on stakeholders’ decision-making. Therefore, this paper constructs a tripartite game model between upstream governments, downstream governments, and the central government by using evolutionary game theory and determines the influence of different factors on the decision-making process of each player through simulation. The results show the following: (1) the initial probability significantly affects the decision-making behavior of each player; (2) daily supervision of the central government and the reduction of the environmental protection cost can promote the implementation of watershed ecological compensation; (3) the fine to downstream governments makes the decisions of the central government and downstream governments change periodically; and (4) the increase of ecological compensation fee urges downstream governments to choose noncompensation, and compensation fee paid by the central government has a critical value.