CNH-S: What Does It Take to Cooperate Over Transboundary Groundwater Resources?

尽管地下水对数十亿人的健康和生计至关重要，但全球地下水正在以惊人的速度枯竭。地下水是一种共享资源，任何用户的抽水都会降低地下水位，从而降低其他用户也开采这一资源的能力。这种现象可能会导致用户在“抽水竞赛”中策略性地过度开采地下水，从而加速地下水的枯竭。不幸的是，很少有法规解决公地的这一悲剧，因为资源的地下性质使得监测特别困难。这项研究试图估计战略性过度开采在多大程度上加速了全球地下水的枯竭，并找出新的机制来解释为什么地下水特别容易发生战略性过度开采，特别是在管辖范围内。这些新的见解将被用来探索新的监管方法，以遏制这种行为。这项研究将把水文、经济和法律结合起来，促进在共享地下水资源方面的合作，从而造福社会。它还将为三名研究生提供跨学科培训，并创建有价值的基础设施，供企业和公共部门广泛共享。逆向选择是市场在不对称信息下崩溃的倾向，因为不确定性导致代理人将别有用心归因于其他代理人达成交易的意愿。由于不对称的水文地质不确定性，地下水可能会出现类似的机制。这项研究将检验这样一个假设，即逆向选择解释了为什么代理人不在共享的地下水资源上合作。该项目有四个部分：(1)对公地悲剧在国际含水层枯竭中所起的作用进行全球评估；(2)建立一个微观经济模型，以调查逆向选择是否可以解释缺乏关于共享地下水的国际协议；(3)通过欧洲和南美的案例研究，开发耦合的人类/地下水模型，以调查为什么在特定含水层出现合作；以及(4)调查卫星数据通过避免逆向选择减少信息不对称和促进合作的潜力，重点放在组成部分(1)中确定的脆弱含水层。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

While crucial to the health and livelihood of billions of people, groundwater is being depleted globally at alarming rates. Groundwater is a shared resource, where pumping by any user decreases groundwater levels and thus the ability of other users to also exploit this resource. This phenomenon can cause users to strategically over-exploit groundwater in a "pumping race" that can accelerate its depletion. Unfortunately, few regulations address this tragedy of the commons because the underground nature of the resource makes it particularly challenging to monitor. This research seeks to estimate the extent to which strategic over-exploitation accelerates global groundwater depletion, and to identify new mechanisms to explain why groundwater is particularly prone to strategic over-exploitation, especially at jurisdictional boundaries. These new insights will be used to explore new regulatory approaches to curtail this behavior. This research will benefit society by integrating hydrology, economics, and law to improve cooperation over shared groundwater resources. It will also provide interdisciplinary training for three graduate students and create valuable infrastructure that will be shared broadly with businesses and the public sector. Adverse selection is the tendency for markets to break down under asymmetric information, because uncertainties cause agents to attribute ulterior motives to other agents' willingness to make a deal. A similar mechanism likely arises for groundwater due to asymmetric hydro-geologic uncertainty. This research will test the hypothesis that adverse selection explains why agents do not cooperate over shared groundwater resources. The project has four components: (1) perform a global assessment of the role played by tragedies of the commons in the depletion of international aquifers; (2) derive a micro-economic model to investigate whether adverse selection can explain the dearth of international agreements on shared groundwater; (3) develop coupled human/groundwater models to investigate why cooperation has emerged in specific aquifers, through case studies in Europe and South America; and (4) investigate the potential for satellite data to attenuate information asymmetry and facilitate cooperation by averting adverse selection, focusing on a vulnerable aquifer identified in component (1).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.