Abstract
Abstract. Many river basins throughout the world are increasingly under pressure as water demands keep rising due to population growth, industrialization, urbanization and rising living standards. In the past, the typical answer to meet those demands focused on the supply side and involved the construction of hydraulic infrastructures to capture more water from surface water bodies and from aquifers. As river basins have become more and more developed, downstream water users and ecosystems have become increasingly dependent on the management actions taken by upstream users. The increased interconnectedness between water users, aquatic ecosystems and the built environment is further compounded by climate change and its impact on the water cycle. Those pressures mean that it has become increasingly important to measure and account for changes in water fluxes and their corresponding economic value as they progress throughout the river system. Such basin water accounting should provide policy makers with important information regarding the relative contribution of each water user, infrastructure and management decision to the overall economic value of the river basin. This paper presents a dynamic water accounting approach whereby the entire river basin is considered as a value chain with multiple services including production and storage. Water users and reservoir operators are considered as economic agents who can exchange water with their hydraulic neighbors at a price corresponding to the marginal value of water. Effective water accounting is made possible by keeping track of all water fluxes and their corresponding hypothetical transactions using the results of a hydro-economic model. The proposed approach is illustrated with the Eastern Nile River basin in Africa.
Highlights
As water resources are increasingly used for various purposes, there is a need for a unified framework to describe, quantify and classify water use in a region, be it a catchment, a river basin or a country
The approach exploits the results of traditional, optimization-based, hydro-economic models such as allocation decisions and marginal water values
By keeping track of the product between the water fluxes and their corresponding water values, it is possible to establish water accounts reflecting the scarcity of water
Summary
As water resources are increasingly used for various purposes, there is a need for a unified framework to describe, quantify and classify water use in a region, be it a catchment, a river basin or a country. Water accounting procedures were quickly enriched by linking water use to relevant productivity indicators (Molden and Sakthivadivel, 1999) in order to provide water managers with strategic information on water allocation in a region. This information can be used to design water saving strategies, to examine the potential for water reallocation, to identify water using activities that require more detailed analysis, etc. It is increasingly adopted, there is no unified procedure to established water accounts, nor is there an agreement on how water accounts must be presented
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