A comprehensive, integrated system of 50 models was developed to evaluate policies that include mixes of building new facilities and changing operating rules to improve water supply, as well as adjusting prices and regulations to reduce demands. Analysis performed with the system resulted in a new national water management policy, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in investment expenditures and reducing agricultural damage by about $15 million per year, while decreasing thermal and algae pollution. The methodology was adopted by the Dutch government and has been used to train water resource planners from many nations.
Large policy studies generally involve too many alternative policies to examine each in detail. As a result, such studies often include a step in which policy options (tactics) that are clearly unattractive are screened out. The output from this step is a small list of tactics that deserve a more thorough evaluation. We describe the screening of tactics to change the movement and storage of water in the lakes and waterways of the Netherlands. This analysis was part of a larger study to help the Dutch government develop a new water management policy. The screening process for each tactic involved obtaining an upper bound on the expected annual benefits from the tactic under various assumptions about future water demands (UB) and comparing this upper bound with the tactic's annualized fixed cost (AFC). If the AFC was less than the UB, the tactic was considered promising and was retained for further analysis. If not, the tactic was screened out. Results from the screening analysis informed policy decisions that will avoid investment expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars and will reduce agricultural damage by about $15 million/year.
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