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As the climate crisis intensifies, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct research aimed at fully understanding the climate change impacts on various infrastructure systems. In particular, the water-electricity demand nexus is a growing area of focus. However, research on the water-electricity demand nexus requires the use of demand data, which can be difficult to obtain, especially across large spatial extents. Here, we present a dataset containing over a decade (2007–2018) of monthly water and electricity consumption data for 46 major US cities (2018 population >250,000). Additionally, we include pre-processed climate data from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) to supplement studies on the relationship between the water-electricity demand nexus and the local climate. This data can be used for a number of studies that require water and/or electricity demand data across long time frames and large spatial extents. The data can also be used to evaluate the possible impacts of climate change on the water-electricity demand nexus by leveraging the relationship between the observed values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the UN concluded, already in 1997, that water would be the most contentious issue of the 21st century, water governance is still confused, nearly everywhere. Even the severe impacts of escalating water bankruptcy and global warming have so far failed to incur a marked improvement in governance systems. The global community has adopted sustainable development as a common vision and guide for the future. Yet, the adoption of the underlying principles of sustainable development has been slow in the water sector and elsewhere. Despite the realization that water governance is a political issue, the near-universal neoliberal agenda tends to only employ technologic and economic solutions to address water problems. This paper presents a historical overview, from the end of the Second World War (WWII) and onwards, of events that could, or should, have had an impact on water management frameworks. It evidences some important consequences of the institutional rigidity exposed during that period. The paper also turns to the fields of science, policy, and management, to pinpoint failures in the translation of political rhetoric as well as new scientific findings into change at the operational level. It explores how an updated knowledge base could serve a quest for sustainable water governance strategies. It is argued that a persistent failure to learn is an important reason behind the dire state that we are now in. As a result, water management is still based on century-old, technocratic, and instrumental methodologies that fail to take advantage of important scientific advancements since WWII and remain unable to properly deal with real-world complexities and uncertainties. The paper concludes that when it is linked to a transformation of the institutional superstructure, adaptive water management (AWM), a framework rooted in systems thinking, emerges as a prominent way to embark on a needed, radical transformation of the water governance systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zayandeh-Rud River Basin in the central plateau of Iran continues to grapple with water shortages due to a water-intensive development path made possible by a primarily supply-oriented water management approach to battle the water limits to growth. Despite inter-basin water transfers and increasing groundwater supply, recurring water shortages and associated tensions among stakeholders underscore key weaknesses in the current water management paradigm. There was an alarming trend of groundwater depletion in the basin's four main aquifers in the 1993–2016 period as indicated by the results of the Mann-Kendall3 (MK3) test and Innovative Trend Analysis (ITA) of groundwater volume. The basin's water resources declined by more than 6 BCM in 2016 compared to 2005 based on the equivalent water height (EWH) derived from monthly data (2002–2016) from the GRACE. The extensive groundwater depletion is an unequivocal evidence of reduced water availability in the face of growing basin-wide demand, necessitating water saving in all water use sectors. Implementing an integrated water resources management plan that accounts for evolving water supply priorities, growing demand and scarcity, and institutional changes is an urgent step to alleviate the growing tensions and preempt future water insecurity problems that are bound to occur if demand management approaches are delayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydropolitical conflicts between the Eastern Nile countries over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are systematically analyzed at three points in time: just before the announcement of construction by Ethiopia on April 11, 2011, before the negotiations in early January 2014, and late August 2014. Hypergame theory, as developed within the framework of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution for handling misperceptions, is used to gain strategic insights into these conflicts and to ascertain the possible resolutions of the disputes. In all of three conflicts, the key decision makers are Egypt and Sudan, the downstream countries, and Ethiopia, the upstream nation. The findings from the analyses demonstrate the significant utilization of strategic surprise, a decisive act in which a decision maker intentionally exercises a course of action in the dispute that is hidden to its opponents in order to attempt to reach a more desirable outcome for itself. In particular, both Egypt and Sudan were caught by surprise when Ethiopia publicly announced on April 11, 2011 that it was going to build GERD, since no prior notification was given. Because Ethiopia was aware of Egypt and Sudan's misperception this dispute is modeled as a second level hypergame. The conflict investigations also show that the geopolitical and economic changes in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia allowed Ethiopia to construct the dam without any harsh confrontation with Egypt and Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining long-term ground-based data on water withdrawal with climate model projections, this study quantifies the compounding effects of human activities and climate change on surface water availability in Iran over the twenty-first century. Our findings show that increasing water withdrawal in Iran, due to population growth and increased agricultural activities, has been the main source of historical water stress. Increased levels of water stress across Iran are expected to continue or even worsen over the next decades due to projected variability and change in precipitation combined with heightened water withdrawals due to increasing population and socio-economic activities. The greatest rate of decreased water storage is expected in the Urmia Basin, northwest of Iran, (varying from ~ − 8.3 mm/year in 2010–2039 to ~ − 61.6 mm/year in 2070–2099 compared with an observed rate of 4 mm/year in 1976–2005). Human activities, however, strongly dominate the effects of precipitation variability and change. Major shifts toward sustainable land and water management are needed to reduce the impacts of water scarcity in the future, particularly in Iran's heavily stressed basins like Urmia Basin, which feeds the shrinking Lake Urmia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lake Urmia in northwest Iran, once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world, has shrunk by almost 90% in area and 80% in volume during the last four decades. To improve the understanding of regional differences in water availability throughout the region and to refine the existing information on precipitation variability, this study investigated the spatial pattern of precipitation for the Lake Urmia basin. Daily rainfall time series from 122 precipitation stations with different record lengths were used to extract 15 statistical descriptors comprising 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and coefficient of variation for annual and seasonal total precipitation. Principal component analysis in association with cluster analysis identified three main homogeneous precipitation groups in the lake basin. The first sub-region (group 1) includes stations located in the center and southeast; the second sub-region (group 2) covers mostly northern and northeastern part of the basin, and the third sub-region (group 3) covers the western and southern edges of the basin. Results of principal component (PC) and clustering analyses showed that seasonal precipitation variation is the most important feature controlling the spatial pattern of precipitation in the lake basin. The 25th and 75th percentiles of winter and autumn are the most important variables controlling the spatial pattern of the first rotated principal component explaining about 32% of the total variance. Summer and spring precipitation variations are the most important variables in the second and third rotated principal components, respectively. Seasonal variation in precipitation amount and seasonality are explained by topography and influenced by the lake and westerly winds that are related to the strength of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Despite using incomplete time series with different lengths, the identified sub-regions are physically meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zayandeh-Rud River basin, Iran, is projected to face spatiotemporally heterogeneous temperature increase and precipitation reduction that will decrease water supply by mid-century. With projected increase (0.70-1.03 °C) in spring temperature and reduction (6-55%) in winter precipitation, the upper Zayandeh-Rud sub-basin, the main source of renewable water supply, will likely become warmer and drier. In the lower sub-basin, 1.1-1.5 °C increase in temperature and 11-31% decrease in annual precipitation are likely. A system dynamics model was used to analyze adaptation strategies taking into account feedbacks between water resources development and biophysical and socioeconomic sub-systems. Results suggest that infrastructural improvements, rigorous water demand management (e.g., replacing high water demand crops such as rice, corn, and alfalfa), and ecosystem-based regulatory prioritization, complemented by supply augmentation can temporarily alleviate water stress in a basin that is essentially governed by the Limits to Growth archetype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is the mainstay of economy in Malawi - the warm heart of Africa. It employs 85 % of the labour force, and produces one third of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 90 % of foreign exchange earnings. Maize farming covers over 92 % of Malawi's agricultural land and contributes over 54 % of national caloric intake. With a subtropical climate and ~99 % rainfed agriculture, Malawi relies heavily on precipitation for its agricultural production. Given the significance of rainfed maize for the nation's labour force and GDP, we have investigated climate change effects on this staple crop. We show that rainfed maize production in the Lilongwe District, the largest maize growing district in Malawi, may decrease up to 14 % by mid-century due to climate change, rising to as much as 33 % loss by the century's end. These declines can substantially harm Malawi's food production and socioeconomic status. Supplemental irrigation, crop diversification and natural conservation methods are promising adaptation strategies to improve Malawi's food security and socioeconomic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea level rise (SLR) is posing a great inundation risk to coastal areas. Some coastal nesting species, including sea turtle species, have experienced diminished habitat from SLR. Contingent valuation method (CVM) was used in an effort to assess the economic loss impacts of SLR on sea turtle nesting habitats for Florida coasts; and to elicit values of willingness to pay (WTP) of Central Florida residents to implement certain mitigation strategies, which would protect Florida's east coast sea turtle nesting areas. Using the open-ended and dichotomous choice CVM, we sampled residents of two Florida communities: Cocoa Beach and Oviedo. We estimated the WTP of households from these two cities to protect sea turtle habitat to be between $42 and $57 per year for 5 years. Additionally, we attempted to assess the impact of the both the respondents' demographics and their perception toward various situations on their WTP value. Findings include a negative correlation between the age of a respondent and the probability of an individual willing to pay the hypothetical WTP amount. We found that WTP of an individual was not dependent on prior knowledge of the effects of SLR on sea turtle habitat. The greatest indicators of whether or not an individual was willing to pay to protect sea turtle habitat were the respondents' perception regarding the trustworthiness and efficiency of the party which will implement the conservation measures and their confidence in the conservation methods used. Respondents who perceive sea turtles having an effect on their life were also more likely to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite having a more advanced water management system than most Middle Eastern countries, similar to the other countries in the region, Iran is experiencing a serious water crisis. The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic. However, the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia. Iran has suffered from a symptom-based management paradigm, which mainly focuses on curing the problem symptoms rather than addressing the main causes. This paper reviews the current status of water resources in Iran and recognizes three major causes for the current water crisis: (1) rapid population growth and inappropriate spatial population distribution; (2) inefficient agriculture sector; and (3) mismanagement and thirst for development. The country is faced with serious challenges in the water sector, including but not limited to rising water demand and shortage, declining groundwater levels, deteriorating water quality, and increasing ecosystem losses. If immediate actions are not taken to address these issues, the situation could become more tragic in the near future. The paper suggests some crisis exit strategies that need to be immediately adopted to secure sustainable water resources, if Iran does not want to lose its international reputation for significant success in water resources management over thousands of years in an arid area of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner's or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders' utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner's ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water resources policy making often involves consideration of a broader scope of environmental, economic, and social issues. This inevitably complicates policy making since consensus among multiple stakeholders with different interests is needed to implement decisions. This work employs several practical and popular voting methods to solve a multi-stakeholder hydro-environmental management problem. Conventionally, voting methods or social choice rules have been applied for consensus development in small groups and elections. This work combines voting methods with a Monte-Carlo selection, in order to help with social choice making under uncertainty. This process is intended to aid decision-makers with understanding of the risks associated with potential decision alternatives. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's water export conflict is solved here as a benchmark problem to illustrate the proposed framework for social decision making and analysis under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Out-of-context analysis of water resources systems can result in unsustainable management strategies. To address this problem, systems thinking seeks to understand interactions among the subsystems driving a system's overall behavior. System dynamics, a method for operationalizing systems thinking, facilitates holistic understanding of water resources systems, and strategic decision making. The approach also facilitates participatory modeling, and analysis of the system's behavioral trends, essential to sustainable management. The field of water resources has not utilized the full capacity of system dynamics in the thinking phase of integrated water resources studies. We advocate that the thinking phase of modeling applications is critically important, and that system dynamics offers unique qualitative tools that improve understanding of complex problems. Thus, this paper describes the utility of system dynamics for holistic water resources planning and management by illustrating the fundamentals of the approach. Using tangible examples, we provide an overview of Causal Loop and Stock and Flow Diagrams, reference modes of dynamic behavior, and system archetypes to demonstrate the use of these qualitative tools for holistic conceptualization of water resources problems. Finally, we present a summary of the potential benefits as well as caveats of qualitative system dynamics for water resources decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the independent and combined effects of changes in temperature and runoff volume on California's water supply and potential water management adaptations. Least-cost water supply system adaptation is explored for two climate scenarios: 1) warmer-drier conditions, and 2) warmer conditions without change in total runoff, using the CALVIN economic-engineering optimization model of California's intertied water supply system for 2050 water demands. The warm-dry hydrology was developed from downscaled effects of the GFDL CM2.1 (A2 emissions scenario) global climate model for a 30-year period centered at 2085. The warm-only scenario was developed from the warm-dry hydrology, preserving its seasonal runoff shift while maintaining mean annual flows from the historical hydrology. This separates the runoff volume and temperature effects of climate change on water availability and management adaptations. A warmer climate alone reduces water deliveries and increases costs, but much less than a warmer-drier climate, if the water supply system is well managed. Climate changes result in major changes in reservoir operations, cyclic storage of groundwater, and hydropower operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In game theory, potential resolutions to a conflict are found through stability analysis, based on stability definitions having precise mathematical structures. A stability definition reflects a decision maker's behavior in a conflict or game, predicts how the game is played, and suggests the resolutions or equilibria of the dispute. Various stability definitions, reflecting different types of people with different levels of foresight, risk attitude, and knowledge of opponents' preferences, have been proposed for resolving games. This paper reviews and illustrates six stability definitions, applicable to finite strategy strategic non-cooperative water resources games, including Nash Stability, General Metarationality (GMR), Symmetric Metarationality (SMR), Sequential Stability (SEQ), Limited-Move Stability, and Non-Myopic Stability. The introduced stability definitions are applied to an interesting and highly informative range of generic water resources games to show how analytical results vary based on the applied stability definitions. The paper suggests that game theoretic models can better simulate real conflicts if the applied stability definitions better reflect characteristics of the players. When there is a lack of information about the types of decision makers, the employment of a range of stability definitions might improve the strategic results and provide useful insights into the basic framework of the conflict and its resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California's hydropower system is composed of high and low elevation power plants. There are more than 150 high-elevation power plants, at elevations above 1,000 feet (300 m). Most have modest reservoir storage capacities, but supply roughly 74% of California's in-state hydropower. The expected shift of runoff peak from spring to winter due to climate warming, resulting in snowpack reduction and increased snowmelt, might have important effects on power generation and revenues in California. The large storage capacities at low-elevation power plants provide flexibility to operations of these units under climate warming. However, with climate warming, the adaptability of the high-elevation hydropower system is in question as this system was designed to take advantage of snowpack, a natural reservoir. With so many high-elevation hydropower plants in California, estimation of climate warming effects by conventional simulation or optimization methods would be tedious and expensive. An Energy-Based Hydropower Optimization Model (EBHOM) was developed to facilitate practical climate change and other low-resolution system-wide hydropower studies, based on the historical generation data of 137 high-elevation hydropower plants for which the data were complete for 14 years. Employing recent historical hourly energy prices, the model was used to explore energy generation in California for three climate warming scenarios (dry warming, wet warming, and warming-only) over 14 years, representing a range of hydrologic conditions. The system is sensitive to the quantity and timing of inflows. While dry warming and warming-only climate changes reduce average hydropower revenues, wet warming could increase revenue. Re-operation of available storage and generation capacities help compensate for snowpack losses to some extent. Storage capacity expansion and to a lesser extent generation capacity expansion both increase revenues, although such expansions might not be cost-effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within river basins different social, economic, political and physical subsystems interact. When making decisions, policy makers should be aware of such interactions as any new policy will affect more than one subsystem. To determine the adequacy of a specific management policy, an integrated study is needed of a complicated water management system in the basin considering major physical, social, economic and political aspects. The Zayandeh-Rud river basin, in central Iran with a semi-arid climate and large agricultural, industrial and domestic water uses, is an example of a complicated watershed system where the lack of complete knowledge about all the interacting subsystems has led to failure of the policymakers in addressing the water shortage in the basin. Although water shortages occur fairly soon after completion of each new water source, transbasin water diversion is still the major policy of water planners to address ongoing shortages. System dynamics provides a unique framework for integrating the disparate physical, socio-economic and political systems important to watershed management. This approach is used to comprehend the interactions of different drivers of the problem and to convey the experiences, lessons learned, and perceptions gained during the model development process. A simulation model, built based on causal loop diagrams of the problem, shows that transbasin diversion is not the best and only solution to the problem. The results of the model for different scenarios suggest that various options of demand management and population control can be more effective in addressing the water crisis of the basin when combined with transbasin water diversions, increasing water storage capacity and controlling of groundwater withdrawal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economically optimal operational changes and adaptations for California's water supply system are examined for a dry form of climate warming (GFDL CM2.1 A2) with year 2050 water demands and land use. Economically adaptive water management for this climate scenario is compared to a similar scenario with the historical climate. The effects of population growth and land use alone are developed for comparison. Compared with the historic hydrology, optimized operations for the dry climate warming scenario raise water scarcity and total operation costs by $490 million/year with year 2050 demands. Actual costs might be somewhat higher where non-economic objectives prevail in water management. The paper examines the economical mix of adaptation, technologies, policies, and operational changes available to keep water supply impacts to such modest levels. Results from this screening model suggest promising alternatives and likely responses and impacts. Optimized operations of ground and surface water storage change significantly with climate. Dry-warm climate change increases the seasonal storage range of surface reservoirs and aquifers. Surface reservoir peak storage usually occurs about a month earlier under dry-warm climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "System Dynamics Evaluation of Climate Change Adaptation Strategies for Water Resources Management in Central Iran" in March 2017 issue is presented.