Abstract
The conventional approach of policy interventions in water management that focus on the portions of the system that directly relate to water often lead to unintended consequences that potentially exacerbate water scarcity issues and present challenges to the future viability of many rural agricultural communities. This paper deploys a system dynamics model to illustrate how expanding the policy space of hydrology models to include socioeconomic feedbacks could address these challenges. In this regard, policies that can potentially mitigate general water scarcity in a region of the American Southwest in southern New Mexico are examined. We selected and tested policies with the potential to diminish water scarcity without compromising the system’s economic performance. These policies included supporting choices that reduce or limit the expansion of water-intensive crops, promoting workforce participation, encouraging investment in capital, and regulating land use change processes. The simulation results, after the proposed boundary expansion, unveiled intervention options not commonly exercised by water decision-makers, bolstering the argument that integrated approaches to water research that include socioeconomic feedbacks are crucial for the study of agricultural community resilience.
Highlights
Managing scarce water resources in dryland—arid and semiarid—regions remains challenging
The model we use here is based on a Lower Rio Grande (LRG) system dynamics model that includes important feedback interactions of the system
With the modified LRG model, we could test the impact of the implementation of the 2005 policy, which limited the volume of water associated with a water right and in effect slowed down the expansion of water-intensive crops
Summary
Managing scarce water resources in dryland—arid and semiarid—regions remains challenging. There are only a few interdisciplinary studies that take both sides of the equation into account (e.g., Picardi and Saeed [7], Saysel et al [8], Simonovic and Rajasekaram [9], Gunda et al [10]) This paper bridges this gap through a previously developed system dynamics model [5] that considers important feedback loops within and between the two interconnected systems: water and society. This boundary expansion offers a policy space that we explored to reveal the effects of innovative water solutions that are usually untapped by traditional disciplinary analyses. The analysis of the implications of innovative alternatives is an important institutional role for supporting social learning, which is essential to adaptively manage social–ecological complexities [12]
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