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

地下水虽然对数十亿人的健康和生计至关重要，但全球正在以惊人的速度枯竭。地下水是一种共有资源，任何用户抽水都会降低地下水位，从而降低其他用户开采这一资源的能力。这种现象可能导致用户在“抽水竞赛”中战略性地过度开采地下水，从而加速其枯竭。不幸的是，很少有法规解决这一公地悲剧，因为资源的地下性质使其特别难以监测。这项研究旨在估计战略性过度开采加速全球地下水枯竭的程度，并确定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，特别是在管辖边界。这些新的见解将用于探索新的监管方法，以减少这种行为。 这项研究将通过整合水文学，经济学和法律来改善共享地下水资源的合作，从而造福社会。它还将为三名研究生提供跨学科培训，并创建将与企业和公共部门广泛共享的宝贵基础设施。逆向选择是市场在信息不对称的情况下崩溃的趋势，因为不确定性导致代理人将不可告人的动机归因于其他代理人的交易意愿。由于不对称的水文地质不确定性，地下水也可能出现类似的机制。这项研究将测试的假设，逆向选择解释了为什么代理人不合作共享地下水资源。该项目有四个组成部分：（1）对“公地悲剧”在国际含水层枯竭方面所起的作用进行全球评估;（2）建立一个微观经济模式，调查逆向选择是否能够解释缺乏关于共有地下水的国际协定的原因;（3）通过欧洲和南美洲的案例研究，建立人类/地下水耦合模型，以调查在特定含水层出现合作的原因;以及（4）调查卫星数据在减少信息不对称和通过避免逆向选择促进合作方面的潜力，重点关注第（1）部分中确定的脆弱含水层。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.