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，全球贸易中几乎每一种产品的生产和运往市场都依赖于水。拟议项目的目标是通过综合物理和经济模型，在人口增长、气候变化、土地利用和排放的各种情景下，确定直接和间接驱动因素对大湖区水质、数量和可用性的影响。该项目将强调对淡水储量和流量进行量化，分析影响用水和分配决策的潜在因素，并制定成本框架，以获取在特定纯度、时间和地点拥有特定数量的水的价值。选择大湖地区是因为其大量可用淡水（但替代率低）、高经济影响、复杂的治理问题、用水部门（如家庭、工业、农业、娱乐和生态系统）之间对水量的竞争日益激烈，以及现有和未来水质恶化的威胁。这个项目将在分析水管理问题方面取得若干进展，包括：(1)发展新的、以物理为基础的模拟方法，以模拟大湖区的数量和质量；(2)创建和测试五大湖供水和水处理中蕴含的能量的新经验模型；(3)选择相关的未来气候、人口、土地利用和排放情景，作为水量和水质预测的输入，并用于这些预测的不确定性分析；(4)制定大湖区各主要用水部门水资源经济评价所需的数据和方法；(5)确定流域当前和未来最重要的取水量和耗水量；(6)收集各主要用水部门的用水价格、效益和成本数据；(7)估计机会成本，以确定减少和消除用水将在哪些方面产生最显著和可持续的效益；(8)确定政策创新（如定价政策，以解决未来情景下大湖区水系脆弱性问题）；(9)确定最需要技术创新的领域，以保护大湖区水系脆弱性。该项目的结果将旨在证明所提出的评估水作为一种材料的价值的框架可以推广到美国和世界的其他地区，以制定明智的水资源利用决策和政策，促进可持续的未来。

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.