Collaborative Research: Coordinating Water Markets and Critical Infrastructure Management to Build Community Resilience to Extreme Drought

干旱是美国最严重的自然灾害之一，对依赖供水的农业和城市社区以及受到低流量威胁的淡水生态系统构成了挑战。这些经济和环境影响也波及整个社会制度，因水和空气质量受损而影响公众健康，因收入损失和失业而影响心理健康。不幸的是，通过需求侧和供应侧管理来减少多部门干旱影响的努力协调不力。此外，干旱管理往往启动得太晚，因为用水者追求短期经济利益，而干旱发展缓慢。迫切需要改进干旱预报，并将早期预警更好地纳入水管理决策支持系统，以减少这些时间上的权衡。该项目的目标是评估对水系统及其机构和有形基础设施进行更好的协调、提供预报信息的干旱管理的潜在收益，以同时减少干旱对社区的影响并促进可持续经济增长。这项研究将支持NSF促进国民健康、繁荣和福利的使命，因为改善干旱管理可以增加农业和城市社区的社会、经济和环境效益。该项目将专注于易受干旱影响的科罗拉多河上游流域，气候变暖和城市快速增长导致的融雪径流量减少正在加剧水资源短缺的风险。将讨论三个科学问题：1)在当前的水管理做法和优先拨款制度下，干旱对农业和城市社区的经济和环境影响是什么？2)如何将有预报条件的水库调度与水市场战略相结合，如补贴休耕、农民对农民的水权交易和城市对农业的期权合同，以及替代计划的权衡是什么？3)这种综合计划在多大程度上减少了对气候极端变化的脆弱性，在哪些方面仍然不足，需要什么预测技能或额外的适应机制才能取得令人满意的业绩？这些问题将通过小组回归模型和开发多目标优化框架来解决，该框架将根据季节性气候预报共同调节关键水库基础设施的运营和水市场交易。这项研究的结果将是制定替代干旱管理政策的综合办法，利益攸关方可以考虑实施这些政策，以实现对极端干旱变化的更可持续的适应。研究团队将在整个项目期间与流域内的农业和城市利益相关者合作，促进将这项研究转化为实践。这一奖项反映了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。

Droughts are among the most severe natural disasters in the US, challenging agricultural and urban communities reliant on water supply, and freshwater ecosystems threatened by low streamflow. These economic and environmental impacts ripple through social systems as well, impacting public health due to impaired water and air quality, and mental health due to revenue losses and unemployment. Unfortunately, attempts to reduce multi-sectoral drought impacts through demand-side and supply-side management are poorly coordinated. Furthermore, drought management often is initiated too late, as water users pursue short-term economic gains while droughts slowly develop. Improved drought forecasts and better integration of early warnings into decision support systems for water management are critically needed to reduce these temporal tradeoffs. The goal of this project is to evaluate the potential gains of better coordinated, forecast-informed drought management of water systems and their institutional and physical infrastructure to simultaneously reduce community impacts of drought and facilitate sustainable economic growth. This research will support NSF’s mission to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare, as improved drought management can increase social, economic, and environmental benefits for agricultural and urban communities.The project will focus on the drought-prone Upper Colorado River Basin, where decreased snowmelt runoff resulting from climate warming and rapid urban growth are intensifying water scarcity risks. Three scientific questions will be addressed: 1) What are the economic and environmental impacts of droughts on agricultural and urban communities under current water management practices and the system of prior appropriation? 2) How can integrating forecast-conditioned reservoir operations with water market strategies such as subsidized fallowing, farmer-to-farmer water rights trading, and urban-to-agricultural option contracts reduce these impacts, and what are the tradeoffs of alternative plans? 3) To what extent do such integrated plans reduce vulnerabilities to changing climate extremes, and where they are still insufficient, what forecast skill or additional adaptation mechanisms would be needed to attain satisfactory performance? These questions will be addressed through panel regression models and the development of a multi-objective optimization framework that jointly conditions the operations of critical reservoir infrastructure and water market transactions on seasonal climate forecasts. The outcome of this research will be an integrated approach to developing alternative drought management policies that stakeholders could consider implementing to achieve more sustainable adaptation to changing drought extremes. The research team will work with agricultural and urban stakeholders in the basin throughout the project to facilitate the translation of this research into practice.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.