A Hydro-Economic Model to Calculate the Resource Costs of Agricultural Water Use and the Economic and Environmental Impacts of Their Recovery
Francesco Sapino, C. Dionisio Pérez‐Blanco, Pablo Saiz-Santiago
Abstract
In this paper, we estimate the resource costs of agricultural water use and simulate the environmental and economic impacts of their recovery. To this end, we develop a socio-hydrology-inspired, dynamic, protocol-based modular approach that interconnects economic and hydrologic modeling via two-way feedback protocols. The hydrologic module is populated with the AQUATOOL model, the Decision Support System used in Spanish river basins; while the economic module is populated with an ensemble of four Mathematical Programming Models (MPMs) that capture human agency and responses. This allows us to sample uncertainty and provide a range for resource costs estimates and the environmental and economic impacts of their recovery, rather than a point estimate. Methods are illustrated with an application to the Órbigo Catchment, a sub-basin of the Douro River Basin in Spain. Our results suggest significant resource costs (a 34–62% increase in existing charges, depending on the model) with non-trivial impacts on income (2–27% reduction) and the environment (water savings range between 6% and 69%), while the impact on tax revenue is ambiguous yet potentially significant (between [Formula: see text]2.3 million EUR/year and 5 million EUR/year).