Kaveh Madani

Synthesis of System Dynamics Tools for Holistic Conceptualization of Water Resources Problems

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.

Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?

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.

Climate change impacts on crop production in Iran's Zayandeh-Rud River Basin.

This study evaluates climate change impacts on crop production and water productivity of four major crops (wheat, barley, rice, and corn) in Irans Zayandeh-Rud River Basin. Multi-model ensemble scenarios are used to deal with uncertainties in climate change projections for the study period (2015-2044). On average, monthly temperature will increase by 1.1 to 1.5°C under climate change. Monthly precipitation changes may be positive or negative in different months of the year. Nevertheless, on the annual basis, precipitation will decrease by 11 to 31% with climate change. While warming can potentially shorten the crop growth period, crop production and water productivity of all crops are expected to decrease due to lower precipitation and higher water requirements under higher temperature. Out of the four studied crops, rice and corn are more vulnerable to climate change due to their high irrigation water demand. So, their continued production can be compromised under climate change. This finding is of particular importance, given the locally high economic and food value of these crops in central Iran.

California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conflict: From Cooperation to Chicken

Californias Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the major hub of Californias water supply system and is central to the ecosystem of many native threatened and endangered species. Conflicts over the Delta have evolved over more than a century. This paper traces changes in this conflict in game-theoretic terms, with its implications for the regions physical and ecological decline and governance. The Delta is not a zero-sum problem and win-win resolutions may exist if stakeholders cooperate. Game theory provides some insights on the potential for win- win solutions. The Delta problem has had a Prisoners Dilemma structure, in which stakeholder self-interest makes cooperation unlikely within a reasonable time frame. However, the core of the Delta conflict is changing as the unsustainable future becomes more widely under- stood. Todays Delta problem has characteristics of a Chicken game, where cooperation is in everyones interest, but it is unlikely because parties deviating from the status quo are likely to bear more of the costs of a long-term solution. The State of California may become the victim (or chicken) of the Delta game, bearing the greatest costs, if it continues to rely on leaving parties to develop voluntary cooperative solutions without a sufficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0000164.

Optimality versus stability in water resource allocation

Water allocation is a growing concern in a developing world where limited resources like fresh water are in greater demand by more parties. Negotiations over allocations often involve multiple groups with disparate social, economic, and political status and needs, who are seeking a management solution for a wide range of demands. Optimization techniques for identifying the Pareto-optimal (social planner solution) to multi-criteria multi-participant problems are commonly implemented, although often reaching agreement for this solution is difficult. In negotiations with multiple-decision makers, parties who base decisions on individual rationality may find the social planner solution to be unfair, thus creating a need to evaluate the willingness to cooperate and practicality of a cooperative allocation solution, i.e., the solutions stability. This paper suggests seeking solutions for multi-participant resource allocation problems through an economics-based power index allocation method. This method can inform on allocation schemes that quantify a partys willingness to participate in a negotiation rather than opt for no agreement. Through comparison of the suggested method with a range of distance-based multi-criteria decision making rules, namely, least squares, MAXIMIN, MINIMAX, and compromise programming, this paper shows that optimality and stability can produce different allocation solutions. The mismatch between the socially-optimal alternative and the most stable alternative can potentially result in parties leaving the negotiation as they may be too dissatisfied with their resource share. This finding has important policy implications as it justifies why stakeholders may not accept the socially optimal solution in practice, and underlies the necessity of considering stability where it may be more appropriate to give up an unstable Pareto-optimal solution for an inferior stable one. Authors suggest assessing the stability of an allocation solution as an additional component to an analysis that seeks to distribute water in a negotiated process.

Bargaining over the Caspian Sea- the Largest Lake on the Earth

The Caspian Sea is considered by some to be the largest lake in the world. This multinational water body is the subject of one of the world’s most intractable disputes, involving Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. The conflict over the legal status of the Caspian Sea emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has not been resolved yet. This paper intends to provide some insights into the conflict and predict the most possible outcomes of the negotiations based on Social Choice rules and Fallback Bargaining procedures. In this study, the five options for resolving the conflict which has been suggested during the negotiations are introduced and discussed. Some well-known social choice rules including Condorcet Choice, Borda Scoring, the Plurality Rule, Median Voting Rule (MVR), Majoritarian Compomise (MC) and Condorcet’s Practical Method (CPM) are applied to find the “socially optimal” resolutions of this conflict. Then some different versions of Fallback Bargaining methods which seek minimizing the maximum dissatisfaction of any bargainer are applied to predict the outcome of the negotiations. Finally, the socially optimal resolutions are compared with Fallback Bargaining methods’ results and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed.

Voting Under Uncertainty: A Stochastic Framework for Analyzing Group Decision Making Problems

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.

Climate Change and Hydropower Planning in the Middle East: Implications for Iran’s Karkheh Hydropower Systems

AbstractGiven the important role of hydropower in peak electricity management, Middle Eastern countries are actively pursuing development of more hydropower resources by construction of large dams. Nonetheless, climate change is expected to affect the future productivity of hydropower by influencing the hydrologic cycle and different climate variables in the region. Although reactive plans to minimize climate change impacts on hydropower production have been implemented in the developed world, the developing world can still benefit from proactive actions. Studies of climate change impacts before and during implementation of hydropower projects can result in timely responses and adaptation to climate change with a potential of considerable cost savings. This study investigates the potential impacts of climate change on the hydropower systems in the Karkheh River Basin—the third largest river basin in Iran—in terms of potential for hydroelectricity generation. A simulation model is developed to examine how ...

Sharing a Multi-National Resource through Bankruptcy Procedures

Bankruptcy procedures are known as fair division methods applicable to monetary problems in which the total amount of the asset is not sufficient to cover the sum of the creditor’s claims. These methods can be also used to solve natural resource allocation problems with the same characteristics in which the bargainers are willing to follow a cooperative approach rather than a competitive attitude. To show the applicability of these methods in water resources allocation problems, this study builds a bankruptcy model for the Caspian Sea negotiations in which five coastal states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan have been negotiating since 1993 without coming up with any agreement neither on the ownerships of waters, nor the oil and natural gas beneath them. In this problem, the total value of oil and natural gas which are currently claimed by the five littoral states is approximately 32 percent higher than the total value of proven and possible oil and gas located in the seabed of the Caspian Sea. The problem is how to determine a fair resource allocation which is associated with the legal status of the Caspian Sea. The developed bankruptcy model is solved with four different allocation rules including Proportional rule, Constrained Equal Award (CEA) rule, Contested Garment Principle, and Adjusted Proportional (AP) rule. Based on the shares of the bargainers under these rules, each party can rank the possible sharing methods. Finally, the study comes up with some recommendations on how to allocate

Multi-level multi-criteria analysis of alternative fuels for waste collection vehicles in the United States

Historically, the U.S. waste collection fleet was dominated by diesel-fueled waste collection vehicles (WCVs); the growing need for sustainable waste collection has urged decision makers to incorporate economically efficient alternative fuels, while mitigating environmental impacts. The pros and cons of alternative fuels complicate the decisions making process, calling for a comprehensive study that assesses the multiple factors involved. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods allow decision makers to select the best alternatives with respect to selection criteria. In this study, two MCDA methods, Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), were used to rank fuel alternatives for the U.S. waste collection industry with respect to a multi-level environmental and financial decision matrix. The environmental criteria consisted of life-cycle emissions, tail-pipe emissions, water footprint (WFP), and power density, while the financial criteria comprised of vehicle cost, fuel price, fuel price stability, and fueling station availability. The overall analysis showed that conventional diesel is still the best option, followed by hydraulic-hybrid WCVs, landfill gas (LFG) sourced natural gas, fossil natural gas, and biodiesel. The elimination of the WFP and power density criteria from the environmental criteria ranked biodiesel 100 (BD100) as an environmentally better alternative compared to other fossil fuels (diesel and natural gas). This result showed that considering the WFP and power density as environmental criteria can make a difference in the decision process. The elimination of the fueling station and fuel price stability criteria from the decision matrix ranked fossil natural gas second after LFG-sourced natural gas. This scenario was found to represent the status quo of the waste collection industry. A sensitivity analysis for the status quo scenario showed the overall ranking of diesel and fossil natural gas to be more sensitive to changing fuel prices as compared to other alternatives.