Rainwater Harvesting and Groundwater Conservation: When Endogenous Heterogeneity Matters

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on resource conservation in a model of decentralized management of groundwater and rainwater. We show that a conservation policy may have opposite effects on the level of the resource, depending on the outcome of the decentralized management. More precisely, we consider identical farmers who can use two water resources (groundwater and/or rainwater) and we study the symmetric and asymmetric feedback stationary Nash equilibria of the dynamic game. We show that a subsidy on the use of rainwater may increase the level of the aquifer at the symmetric equilibrium, whereas it decreases the level of the aquifer at the asymmetric equilibrium. This suggests that the usual focus on (interior) symmetric equilibria in dynamic games may provide misleading policy implications. JEL ClassificationWe acknowledge financial support from the ANR project "RISECO", ANR-08-JCJC-0074-01. R. Soubeyran (B) · M. Tidball

Development of dual water supply using rooftop rainwater harvesting and groundwater systems

“…Therefore, the main aim of this study was to adopting the RWH system and groundwater abstraction as part of the conservation of natural water resources. This has also been investigated in some countries such as in France [24,25] and Vietnam [26] and successfully implemented. To determine the collection efficiencies of RWH system, a comparison between the actual rainwater that can be harvested and the observed harvested rainwater was made.…”

Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind: Developments in Economic Models of Groundwater Management

“…The relevance of applying game theory to common-property resources (CPR) has been noted at least since Hardin's (1968) paper on the tragedy of the commons, which has the structure of a Prisoner's Dilemma since all users end up worse by acting independently. Nevertheless, within non-cooperative games solutions can still vary significantly depending on user strategies and aquifer properties (Madani & Dinar, 2012b;Negri, 1989;Rubio & Casino, 2003;Soubeyran, Tidball, Tomini, & Erdlenbruch, 2014). The sensitivity of user behavior to spatial aquifer characteristics appears even in a laboratory setting (Liu, Suter, Messer, Duke, & Michael, 2014;Suter, Duke, Messer, & Michael, 2012).…”

Sustainable Groundwater Management in a Two-Cell Aquifer Model

“…The hydrological literature on the conjunctive use of surface and groundwater at a basin scale exists but is scarce. Some economic models have also considered several connected bathtub aquifers, several sources of water between surface water, rainwater and aquifer water (Zeitouni and Dinar, 1997;Athanassoglou et al, 2012;Roumasset and Wada, 2012;Soubeyran et al, 2015;Stahn and Tomini, 2017). These models often focus on irrigated agriculture with farmers maximising their payoffs.…”