Murray-Darling Basin Plan: Case Study in Market-Based Approach to Water Sharing in Australia

The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is an area in southeastern Australia that has the largest and most regulated river system in the country. Historically, it has been an area of conflict over water resources, with efforts to bring the different states together to negotiate water sharing since the early 1900s. In the 20th century, the focus of water policy was predominantly on water supply infrastructure: building large-scale dam storages, weirs, and other irrigation region infrastructure. However, increasing problems with both water quality and quantity from the 1970s onwards—such as acid sulphate soils, salinity, declines in vegetation health, and species loss—meant that more attention was turned to water demand management options. These included establishing formal water markets, trade liberalization, and water extraction caps. The National Water Initiative (2004) and the Water Act (2007) laid the groundwork in unbundling water and land ownership and created the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). The MDBA was tasked with developing the MDB Plan (Basin Plan 2012) to readjust the balance between consumptive water use and the environment. The Basin Plan when implemented in 2012 aimed to return up to one third of consumptive water extraction to environmental use, making it one of the biggest reallocations of water to the environment in the world. It has predominantly used market-based approaches to do so. However, conflict over water sharing has remained a dominant feature of MDB water reform. Self-interest among states and irrigation interests have impacted environmental water recovery methods, resource expenditure, and allocation—subsequently weakening both the Basin Plan and water policy in general. Given current policy developments, there is real danger of targets not being met, and environmental sustainability being continually compromised. The ongoing issues of drought, climate change, and readdressing First Nations access to—and ownership of—water have emphasized distributional issues in water sharing. It is clear also that the Basin Plan has been wrongly blamed and misattributed for ongoing rural community declines, with current amendments and reductions in water reallocation targets a result of this. What is clear is that the Basin Plan is currently not the fully sustainable solution for water sharing that it set out to be. It will need to continually evolve, along with various institutions to support water governance and rural community economic development in general, to address existing overallocation and future climate challenges. The challenges of equity, rural community development, and distributional fairness lie firmly in the sphere of strong governance, high-quality data, and first-best economic and scientific policies.

Water conflict between Pakistan and India: Implications to regional peace and security

Pakistan and India are water stressed countries and the seed of water conflict between the two has been sowed by the Punjab boundary commission at the time of Partition. Trans-boundary water treaties have played a significant role in resolving the water disputes though the mechanism of conflict resolution varies and structurally fails to address the future problems that may arise. Indus Water Treaty (IWT) has been examined as an efficacious Model of conflict resolution and induced cooperation from 1960s to 1980s. Pakistan claimed that India is violating IWT by building dams and diverting waters of Western Rivers flowing from India to Pakistan. Therefore, the research attempts to answer the following questions. What is the cumulative effect of Indian dams being constructed on the Western Rivers? Can India Unilaterally withdraw the treaty? What would be the implications if India violates the treaty? Holistic content analysis of qualitative method and conflict theory has been used to investigate the water conflict between Pakistan and India. The key findings are that violation of treaty by India is perceived as security threat by Pakistan and also increase its economic concerns. The tension between the two neighbours over water sharing can lead to water war which poses serious threats to regional peace and security.

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.

Sudan coup will trigger complex political standoff

Significance Protest leaders are demanding a full transition to civilian rule. However, military leaders appear determined to retain power, setting the stage for an escalating confrontation. Impacts The transition has challenged ingrained gender inequalities, and women may play a key role in resisting military rule. Economic fallout from the coup will be significant, erasing recent limited progress and intensifying hardships for ordinary Sudanese. Military rule may mean a more confrontational posture over border and water-sharing disputes with Ethiopia.

Conflicts in the Nile Basin and the Change of Power Balance

Ethiopian–Egyptian relations have seen remarkable tension since Ethiopia began the Renaissance Dam construction in 2011, and tensions have since escalated when Ethiopia announced the filling stage. While Ethiopia defends its project due to its economic importance, Egypt fears its negative effects. The paper discusses the hydro-political differences between the Nile Basin countries, particularly Egypt and Ethiopia, regarding the issue of water sharing and the means of settling it. It also discusses the consequent diplomatic problems and changes in the balance of power in Africa with the rise of Ethiopia as a regional power. The paper has found that the worsening of the Nile Basin situation is a result of the persistence of the conflicting parties and their adherence to their positions with no willingness to make concessions. Given the lack of a comprehensive legal agreement to regulate the exploitation and sharing of Nile water, the only way to put an end to this conflict is through cooperation between all basin countries.

Review of hydro-economic models (HEMs) which focus on transboundary river water sharing disputes

Hydro-economic models (HEMs) are powerful tools to analyze water scarcity, drought, and water management problems. Though several HEMs reviews have been conducted in the recent past, none of them focused on the management of transboundary river water disputes, benefit sharing, or trade-offs. Therefore, this review explored how HEMs can suggest mitigating water sharing disputes on transboundary rivers. Though more than 300 HEMs have been developed worldwide, very few focused on transboundary river water disputes. After vigorous screening at Google Scholar, only 25 articles were found which focused on transboundary river water disputes. Most HEMs that were reviewed proposed to share benefits such as sharing hydropower produced from the river, reallocating water from low-value agriculture to high-value agriculture or managed operation of the dam, or other monetary compensation. But no study assessed non-water sector benefit sharing such as trade or transit. Most HEMs focused on irrigation and hydropower which are benefits from the river and very few studies focused on fisheries, environment, and wetland which are benefits to the river. International rivers can act as a catalyst among the riparian countries and promote cooperation in trade, commerce, exchange of technologies, and other fields. HEMs can play an important role in this regard. It is to be mentioned that HEMs cannot resolve water conflicts in a shared basin, they only can propose for the options of solution.

Analysis of long-term strategies of riparian countries in transboundary river basins

Transboundary river basins give rise to complex water-sharing decision making that can be analyzed as a game in the sense of dynamic game theory, as done in this work. The sharing of transboundary water resources depends on the long-term shifting interactions between upstream and downstream countries, which has received limited research attention in the past. The water-sharing strategy of a riparian country depends on the strategies of other countries over time. This paper presents an evolutionary game method to analyze the long-term water-sharing strategies of countries encompassing transboundary river basins over time. The method analyzes the evolutionary strategies of riparian countries and investigates evolutionary stable strategies (ESSs) considering the payoff matrix. The evolutionary game method is applied to a river basin shared by three countries assuming two types of benefits and one type of cost to countries as decision variables of a game that reflects water use, economic and political gains, and socio-economic losses of countries. Numerical examples illustrate the strategies resulting from the evolutionary game processes and the role of several parameters on the interaction between riparian countries. The countries’ strategies are analyzed for several levels of benefits and costs, and the convergence of the strategies to a stable point is assessed. Results demonstrate the role that the upstream country’s potential benefits and the cost of conflict (i.e., non-cooperation) to other countries has on reaching a stable point in the game. This work’s results show the potential benefit to the upstream country under cooperative strategy must exceed its benefits from water use under non-cooperative strategy to gain the full stable cooperation of downstream countries. This work provides a method to resolve water-sharing strategies by countries sharing transboundary river basins and to evaluate the implications of cooperation or non-cooperation.

Water sharing policies conditioned on hydrologic variability to inform reservoir operations

Water resources infrastructure is critical for energy and food security; however, the development of large-scale infrastructure, such as hydropower dams, may significantly alter downstream flows, potentially leading to water resources management conflicts and disputes. Mutually agreed upon water sharing policies for the operation of existing or new reservoirs is one of the most effective strategies for mitigating conflict, yet this is a complex task involving the estimation of available water, identification of users and demands, procedures for water sharing, etc. A water sharing policy framework that incorporates reservoir operating rules optimization based on conflicting uses and natural hydrologic variability, specifically tailored to drought conditions, is proposed. First, the trade-off between downstream and upstream water availability utilizing multi-objective optimization of reservoir operating rules is established. Next, reservoir operation with the candidate (optimal) rules is simulated, followed by their performance evaluations, and the rule selections for balancing water uses. Subsequently, a relationship between the reservoir operations simulated from the selected rules and drought-specific conditions is built to derive water sharing policies. Finally, the reservoir operating rules are re-optimized to evaluate the effectiveness of the drought-specific water sharing policies. With a case study of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile river, it is demonstrated that the derived water sharing policy can balance GERD power generation and downstream releases, especially in dry conditions, effectively sharing the hydrologic risk in inflow variability among riparian countries. The proposed framework offers a robust approach to inform water sharing policies for sustainable management of water resources.