The Role of Groundwater‐dependent Ecosystems in Groundwater Management

Abstract

Ecosystems provide a wide range of services essential for a proper environmental, economic, and social performance. While the estimated global value of ecosystem services in 2014 is very significant, the annual loss of ecosystem services value is alarming. Our paper focuses on groundwater‐dependent ecosystems (GDEs), some very important to society, which are under threat due to groundwater overexploitation. Considering the ecosystem health/status function is essential for sound groundwater regulation policy. The paper assesses the conjunctive management of groundwater and GDEs both in theory and in a relevant case study, using a certain type of an ecosystem health function. The theoretical results demonstrate how the change in the slope values of a general ecosystem health function affects the optimal groundwater management policy. The analysis also suggests a change in groundwater management strategies as a function of the value of the ecosystem. The theoretical findings are corroborated with data from an aquifer in Spain and its associated GDE—the Tablas de Daimiel Wetland. The paper highlights theoretically and empirically the necessity for a better understanding of GDEs behavior. It calls for groundwater regulation to protect these resources.

Comparing Alternative Policies for Modification of Energy Subsidies: The Case of Groundwater Pumping for Irrigation

“…Notice that since myopic users are optimizing by equating their marginal costs to their marginal benefits without accounting for the marginal user cost, they will start by extracting the same amount and then change their behavior as their cost changes over time. A similar result has been reported by Nasim and Helfand (2015) and Esteban and Dinar (2016).…”

Ecosystem Shifts: Implications for Groundwater Management

“…Several studies have included ecosystems as relevant elements in groundwater management (e.g., Roumasset and Wada 2013;Gutrich et al 2016;Esteban and Dinar 2016;Pongkijvorasin et al 2018;Pereau et al 2019). However, to the best of our knowledge none of them have specifically included the possibility of tipping points involving regime shifts in the ecological systems.…”

“…Our contribution lies in the consideration of switches in the state function of an ecosystem when a critical water level ('tipping point') is reached. Despite linear ecosystem behavior was considered a good approximation of the performance of ecosystems (Esteban and Dinar 2016), several studies point out that nonlinear specifications including shifts, tipping points, and even hysteresis processes, better represent the behavior of ecosystems (Scheffer et al 2001;Scheffer and Carpenter 2003). For simplicity, in this manuscript we assume that groundwater depletion presents two alternative stable states after a certain tipping point is reached (e.g., decrease in the groundwater table level).…”

Economics of social trade-off: Balancing wastewater treatment cost and ecosystem damage

“…If the ecosystem state is on the upper line and close to point "A," small changes in the conditions may lead to a catastrophic switch to the lower line. To switch again to the upper line, the external conditions need to be reversed far enough to reach point "B" (Scheffer et al, 2001;Esteban and Dinar, 2016). Fig.…”