Abstract:
Groundwater discharge exceeding recharge threatens sustainable aquifer water use internationally. Interest remains high in discovering more hydrologically sustainable and economically affordable measures to protect these aquifers. Previous research has conducted various aquifer assessments. Some work has investigated costs and benefits of various plans that would limit aquifer pumping. Despite notable advances in this kind of analysis, little published work to date has unified these elements into a science-based integrated framework to inform more sustainable aquifer policy design. This work\'s novel contribution is to integrate analysis of hydrology, economics, institutions, and policy into a unified scientific framework to inform choices on more sustainable pumping strategies while protecting economic activity for agricultural and urban water-using sectors. It does so by conceptualizing, formulating, designing, and applying a mathematical programming framework to replicate historically observed pumping patterns in parts of the Southern and Central High Plains Ogallala Aquifer region in New Mexico, USA. We first calibrated the optimization framework to replicate the historically observed data. We then go on to identify least cost pumping caps that would have partly restored the aquifer to its 2014 level by 2020, while comparing the performance of four other partial aquifer protection policy measures. Findings indicate a surprisingly low cost that could have been incurred to partially protect the aquifer over that period. However, these low costs are complicated by (1) decreasing water quality outside of the irrigated regions and (2) focusing of lateral inputs to a narrower zone of depression around the irrigated regions. These findings carry important implications for identifying more sustainable aquifer management plans internationally. The work\'s importance comes from its capacity to inform policy debates over a range of water shortage sharing plans, while respecting institutional constraints governing equitable burden sharing.
摘要:
地下水排放超过补给量,威胁到国际上可持续的含水层用水。人们对发现更多水文可持续和经济上负担得起的措施来保护这些含水层的兴趣仍然很高。以前的研究已经进行了各种含水层评估。一些工作调查了限制含水层抽水的各种计划的成本和收益。尽管这种分析取得了显著进展,迄今为止,很少有发表的工作将这些要素统一到一个基于科学的综合框架中,以指导更可持续的含水层政策设计。这项工作的新贡献是整合水文学分析,经济学,机构,并将政策纳入一个统一的科学框架,为选择更可持续的抽水战略提供信息,同时保护农业和城市用水部门的经济活动。它通过概念化来做到这一点,制定,设计,并应用数学编程框架来复制新墨西哥州南部和中部高平原Ogallala含水层地区部分地区历史上观察到的抽水模式,美国。我们首先校准了优化框架,以复制历史上观察到的数据。然后,我们继续确定成本最低的抽水上限,该上限将在2020年之前将含水层部分恢复到2014年的水平,同时比较其他四项部分含水层保护政策措施的性能。调查结果表明,在此期间,部分保护含水层的成本可能非常低。然而,这些低成本是复杂的(1)降低水质量以外的灌区和(2)集中的横向输入到一个较窄的凹陷区域周围的灌溉区域。这些发现对于在国际上确定更可持续的含水层管理计划具有重要意义。这项工作的重要性来自于它为一系列水资源短缺共享计划的政策辩论提供信息的能力,同时尊重公平分担负担的体制约束。