Climate Change and the Stability of Water Allocation Agreements

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Climate Change and the Stability of Water Allocation Agreements SummaryWe analyse agreements on river water allocation between riparian countries. Besides being efficient, water allocation agreements need to be stable in order to be effective in increasing the efficiency of water use. In this paper, we assess the stability of water allocation agreements, using a game theoretic model. We consider the effects of climate change and the choice of a sharing rule on stability. Our results show that both a decrease in mean river flow and an increase in the variance of river flow decrease the stability of an agreement. An agreement where the downstream country is allocated a fixed amount of water has the lowest stability compared to other sharing rules.

The Economics of Transboundary River Management

“…The intuition of this result is that, similar to the setting of Ansink and Ruijs (2008), upstream countries have the highest incentive to deviate, as was illustrated in Figure 3. Since the upstream incremental distribution is efficient and gives the highest transfers possible to the upstream countries, this solution simultaneously minimizes the incentives to deviate.…”

“…The authors proceed to assess threshold discount factors for which other, more restrictive, subsets of agreements can be sustained in equilibrium. These subsets include simple sharing rules as assessed by Ansink and Ruijs (2008), Nash-bargaining solutions, and renegotiation-proof equilibria. …”

Composition properties in the river claims problem

“…The impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle are, in many river basins, amplifying natural levels of variability. When drafting sharing rules for river water, efficiency and stability can be enhanced by taking into account such variability (Ansink and Ruijs, 2008;Ambec et al, 2013;Ansink and Houba, 2013) The applicability and desirability of the Composition axioms is evident for such rules. In our paper, the linear order provides a rigid structure to the river claims problem so that these axioms (e.g.…”

Management of Transboundary Water Resources under Scarcity

“…In regions already governed by a water treaty, climate change and water supply variability could affect the ability of basin states to meet their water agreement commitments and effectively manage transboundary waters (Ansink and Ruijs, 2008;Drieschova et al, 2008). This is particularly salient in agreements that are not appropriately designed to deal with environmental changes and similar forms of uncertainty.…”

“…They demonstrate the usefulness of the model in the case of the Aral Sea basin. Ansink and Ruijs (2008) address the sharing problem by assessing the effect of climate change and the choice of a sharing rule on stability of the agreement using a game theoretic model. The results of their work suggest that a decrease in mean river flow decreases the stability of an agreement, while an increased variance can have a positive or a negative effect on stability, depending on the institutions in place.…”