Collaborative Research: Modeling and Analyzing the Use, Efficiency, Value and Governance of Water as a Material in the Great Lakes Region Through an Integrated Approach

人们普遍认为，水是我们经济、社会和环境福祉的基础。 众所周知，全球商业中几乎每一种产品的生产和交付到市场都依赖于水。 拟议项目的目标是通过综合物理和经济模型，并在人口增长、气候变化、土地使用和排放的各种情景下，确定五大湖地区直接和间接驱动因素对水质、水量和可用性的影响。 该项目将强调量化淡水的存量和流量，分析影响水资源使用和分配决策的潜在因素，并制定成本框架，以获取在给定纯度，时间和地点提供特定数量的水的价值。 选择五大湖地区是因为该地区拥有大量可用淡水（但替代率低），经济影响大，治理问题复杂，用水部门之间对水量的竞争日益激烈（例如，该项目将在水管理问题的分析方面取得若干进展，包括（1）开发新的基于物理的建模方法来模拟五大湖地区的数量和质量;（2）为五大湖的水输送和处理创造和测试新的、经验性的能源模型;（3）选择相关的未来气候、人口、土地利用和排放情景，用作水量和水质预测的输入，并用于分析这些预测的不确定性;（4）规定对五大湖流域各主要用水部门的水资源进行经济评价所需的数据和方法;（5）确定流域内目前和未来最重要的取水量和用水量;（6）收集各主要用水部门用水的价格、效益和成本数据;（7）估算机会成本，以确定最大限度地减少和消除用水将在哪些方面产生最显著和最可持续的效益;（8）确定政策创新（例如，定价政策，以解决未来情景下五大湖水系统的脆弱性;以及（9）确定最需要技术创新以保护五大湖系统脆弱性的领域。 该项目的结果旨在证明，用于评估水作为一种材料的价值的拟议框架可以扩展到美国和世界其他地区，以促进可持续未来的明智用水决策和政策。

It is accepted that water is at the foundation of our economic, societal, and environmental well-being. It is also well known that nearly every product in global commerce is dependent on water for its production and delivery to the marketplace. The objective of the proposed project is to determine, through integrated physical and economic models and under various scenarios of population growth, climate change, land use, and emissions, the impact of direct and indirect drivers on water quality, quantity, and availability in the Great Lakes region. The project will emphasize quantifying the stocks and flows of fresh water, analyzing the underlying factors affecting water use and allocation decisions, and developing cost frameworks for capturing the value of having a specific amount of water available at a given purity, time, and location. The Great Lakes region is chosen due to its large volume of available freshwater (but low rate of replacement), high economic impact, complex governance issues, increasing competition for on water quantity among water-use sectors (e.g., domestic, industrial, agricultural, recreational, and ecosystems), and existing and future threats water quality deterioration.This project will result in several advances in the analysis of water management issues, including (1) development of new, physically-based modeling approaches to simulate quantity and quality in the Great Lakes region; (2) creation and testing new, empirical models of the energy embodied in water delivery and treatment for the Great Lakes context; (3) selection of relevant future climate, population, land use, and emissions scenarios to use as input to water quantity and quality predictions and in analyses of uncertainty in those predictions; (4) prescription of data and methods required for economic valuation of water resources in each of the major sectors of water use in the Great Lakes basin; (5) identification of the most significant current and future withdrawals and consumptive uses of water in the basin; (6) collection of data on the prices, benefits, and costs of water consumption in each major water use sector; (7) estimates of opportunity costs to determine where water use minimization and elimination will have the most significant and sustainable benefits; (8) identify policy innovations (e.g. pricing policies to address vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes water system under future scenarios; and (9) identify areas where technological innovations are most needed to protect vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes systems. Results from this project will aim to demonstrate that the proposed frameworks for assessing the value of water as a material can be extended to other regions in the U.S. and the world for informed water use decision-making and policies promoting a sustainable future.