When the water runs dry: supporting adaptive governance in transboundary river basins

How to promote the public participation in eco-compensation in transboundary river basins: A case from Planned Behavior perspective

ABSTRACTRiver health is a concern worldwide. Governance of river basins is particularly complicated when they are large scale and cross jurisdictional boundaries. Past approaches to making decisions in transboundary basins are limited and attention is increasingly being focused on the potential of collaboration. This research investigates the initiation phase of a collaborative conservation project (WWF-Canada Freshwater Program, St. John River project) in the St. John River Basin of Canada. A social-ecological inventory technique and social network analysis are used to identify the actors in the transboundary basin and their activities, perceptions and connections to river health, relationship with other stakeholders, and actual engagement with a milestone event in the project. Insights gained from exploring the relationships between/among these variables highlight the complicated nature of initiating collaboration. A common understanding of river health and a strong structure of connected actors were encouraging signs that collaboration may flourish, while the assertion of power and context surrounding the initiative were found to mediate its possibility. The collaborative potential of conservation projects in large-scale transboundary river basins may be enhanced through such research and by actively applying these insights.

Due to the complex situation of integrated water resources management in transboundary river basins, this research built a set of indicators for sustainable use of water resources by the Delphi method and developed a specific calculation method for 22 indicators of 5 groups. The integrated indicator has 5 assessment levels to demonstrate the magnitude of water use and the renewability of water resources. Using these indicators to evaluate the sustainability of three border provinces in the Mekong transboundary basin which are Kontum, Attapue, and Ratanakiri, this research came to the conclusions that 9/24 districts in three provinces have moderate water use and renewable water resources level; the remaining districts are also using water at a moderate level but with low renewable water resources. Furthermore, research results showed that different governmental policies generated varying impacts on the sustainable use of water resources in three provinces. Hence, this research is an important scientific foundation for the authorities to build cooperative water resource management programs in transboundary river basins. In future research, the availability of a more detailed dataset will enable the construction of a more comprehensive water resource management plan for different phases.

Water has consistently been one of the globe’s most vital strategic resources, serving as both a catalyst for peace and a potential source of strife. Amidst growing environmental catastrophes and pervasive droughts, water has become a pivotal factor in geopolitical maneuvers. The Middle East countries especially Iran, confronted with a critical water shortage, is grappling with internal resource management issues while simultaneously experiencing escalating tensions with neighboring nations over shared water supplies. This dilemma is particularly evident in the transboundary river basin with nations such as Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and it has the potential to worsen regional tensions and conflicts.This study examines the impacts of agricultural development and climate change over the past four decades on six major water basins in Iran, aiming to identify key water-related conflict zones and explore the intersection of water issues with political, economic and social divisions. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was used to assess the severity of drought in these basins throughout the period of 1980-2020. Statistical analysis of groundwater resources and dam data reveals the negative effects of human activities on water availability. Despite being situated in a semi-arid region, Iran has built more than 400 dams in the past four decades across various basins, primarily to expand irrigated agriculture and generate hydroelectric power. The results of this study show that drought conditions in Iran began to intensify in the late 1990s. During particularly severe drought years, such as 1999, 2000, 2001, 2008, and 2010, the abstraction of groundwater resources especially deep and semi-deep wells increased dramatically.Concurrently, neighboring countries in transboundary basins such as Euphrates-Tigris River Basin, located in the west of Iran and Hirmand (Helmand) River Basin, located in the east of Iran have expanded their own irrigated areas, which has heightened tensions between Iran and its neighbors. The worsening water crisis is likely to exacerbate both internal and regional conflicts, with potential consequences for Iran’s national security and foreign policy.Regional and international collaboration, along with the development of sustainable agricultural practices and integrated water resource management systems, will be critical to ensuring sustainable environmental development in the Middle East, especially for Iran. Addressing these challenges in a cooperative manner can mitigate future conflicts and promote long-term stability in the region. Enhancing water conservation and efficiency in agriculture, strengthening water governance and policy reforms, fostering climate adaptation and resilience, promoting transboundary water cooperation, and advancing innovative water treatment technologies are all crucial components for ensuring sustainable development in the region.

In many transboundary river basins, shared water resources are formally regulated through water-related agreements, laws, and regulations. These institutional documents contain diverse types of water governance rules that shape strategies and opportunities for cooperation among stakeholders. Such rules may, for example, constrain water withdrawal limits, facilitate information sharing, or coordinate collective decision-making over the development and management of shared water resources. Understanding the content of these rules and their diverse functions is therefore essential for informed policy and institutional designs in transboundary water governance.In this study, we propose a set of rule-based indicators for assessing water governance regimes, grounded in the rule concepts of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. By combining these indicators with the content analysis tool of the Institutional Grammar, which enables the systematic dissection of water agreements and legislation across different formats, the proposed approach is able to use institutional rules as core analytical elements for water governance analysis. This allows for the evaluation of both the level of cooperation and the distribution of water management authority within water governance systems, and ultimately, identify the water governance modes (i.e., polycentric, centralized, or decentralized) of the basins.We demonstrate the application of this integrated approach through a comparative analysis of four interstate river basins: the Colorado River Basin and the Delaware River Basin in the United States, the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia, and the Yellow River Basin in China. The main rivers of these subnational transboundary river basins span multiple states or provinces and are governed by extensive rule systems embedded in water agreements and legislation. The results indicate that the governance regimes of the Delaware River Basin and the Murray–Darling Basin are predominantly polycentric, the Upper Colorado River Basin exhibits a hybrid regime combining centralized and polycentric characteristics, while the Yellow River Basin is characterized by a strongly centralized governance regime.

When the availability of a vital resource varies between times of overabundance and extreme scarcity, management regimes must manifest flexibility and authority to adapt while maintaining legitimacy. Unfortunately, the need for adaptability often conflicts with the desire for certainty in legal and regulatory regimes, and laws that fail to account for variability often result in conflict when the inevitable disturbance occurs. Additional keys to resilience are collaboration among physical scientists, political actors, local leaders, and other stakeholders, and, when the commons is shared among sovereign states, collaboration between and among institutions with authority to act at different scales or with respect to different aspects of an ecological system. At the scale of transboundary river basins, where treaties govern water utilization, particular treaty mechanisms can reduce conflict potential by fostering collaboration and accounting for change. One necessary element is a mechanism for coordination and collaboration at the scale of the basin. This could be satisfied by mechanisms ranging from informal networks to the establishment of an international commission to jointly manage water, but a mechanism for collaboration at the basin scale alone does not ensure sound water management. To better guide resource management, study of applied resilience theory has revealed a number of management practices that are integral for adaptive governance. Here, we describe key resilience principles for treaty design and adaptive governance and then apply the principles to a case study of one transboundary basin where the need and willingness to manage collaboratively and iteratively is high—the Okavango River Basin of southwest Africa. This descriptive and applied approach should be particularly instructive for treaty negotiators, transboundary resource managers, and should aid program developers.

Half the world's population resides within 310 transboundary lake and river basins shared among 151 riparian nations. Approximately 60% of these basins lack cooperative frameworks to share water. The complexities of sharing water necessitate identifying approaches for managing transboundary international freshwater resources. While much has been written about the histories, theory, and mechanisms of transboundary water management, conflict, and cooperation among riparian nations, we draw attention to scholarship written about what we believe is the central tool for cooperation: data and data sharing. The 1997 United Nations' Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UN Watercourse Convention) recognizes sharing water resources data is vital to river basin cooperation. Data sharing builds trust between riparian states, aids in mitigating conflict, and improves environmental, economic, and social outcomes. Despite calls to increase data sharing in transboundary basins to support cooperative management, few papers review the role of data sharing in transboundary water management, including how often and what types of water resources data and information are shared. We synthesize the role of data in conflict and collaboration from peer-reviewed papers on transboundary water management from the year the UN Watercourse Convention went into force, 2014 to May 2022. We outline what scholars argue are the types of water-related data to be shared, the frequency of data sharing, and the mechanisms for sharing data for facilitating cooperation in transboundary waters.

An integrated model of water resources optimization allocation based on projection pursuit model – Grey wolf optimization method in a transboundary river basin

<p>New dams can alter river flow regimes impacting downstream benefits and multi-sector services from water infrastructure and ecosystems. Impacts can be unpredictable in complex transboundary river basins that do not follow standardised operating rules nor have extensive historical data. In this case it is more difficult to assess the consequences of new infrastructure and provide a structured approach to achieve cooperative operating strategies to avoid transboundary water conflicts. This study presents a framework to evaluate the benefits of cooperation on managing new dams in transboundary multi-sector river basins that do not have formal cooperating strategies. A case study of the new Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam (PMD) located in Ghana’s Volta river basin is provided. The PMD could impact downstream riverine livelihood, ecosystem services, and water infrastructure like the downstream Aksomobo hydropower plant, the country's largest installed generation plant (1,020 MW). Also, the PDM could be impacted by future irritation developments of the Bagre Dam, an existing upstream dam managed in Burkina Faso. We show that a non-cooperative operation between the PMD and the Bagre dam in Burkina Faso could reduce inflows into the Akosombo dam, negatively impacting national hydropower generation. Also, a non-cooperative operation could decrease floods in Northern Ghana, impacting environmental services and local communities that depend on flood recession activities. We show that cooperative infrastructure management achieved by the proposed approach could offset possible negative impacts produced by the new PMD.</p>

GRACE Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) provides unique and unprecedented perspectives about freshwater availability and change globally. However, GRACE-TWS records are relatively short for long-term hydroclimatic variability studies, dating back to April 2002. In this paper, we made use of Noah Land Surface Model (LSM), and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) data in an autoregressive model with exogenous variables (ARX) to reconstruct a 66-year record of TWS for nine major transboundary river basins (TRBs) in Africa. Model performance was evaluated using standard indicators, including the Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency criteria, cumulative density frequency, standardized residuals plots, and model uncertainty bounds. Temporally, the reconstruction results were evaluated for trend, cycles, and mode of variability against ancillary data from the WaterGAP Model (WGHM-TWS) and GPCC-based precipitation anomalies. The temporal pattern reveals good agreement between the reconstructed TWS, WGHM-TWS, and GPCC, (p-value < 0.0001). The reconstructed TWS suggests a significant declining trend across the northern and central TRBs since 1951, while the southern basins show an insignificant trend. The mode of variability analysis indicates short storage periodicity of four to sixteen-month in the northern basins, while strong intra-annual variability in the central and southern basins. The long-term TWS records provide additional support to Africa’s water resources research on hydroclimatic variability and change in shared transboundary water basins.

Transboundary water management is a complex multidisciplinary thematic, with many of the factors involved to have a distinct tendency of exacerbation due to climate change. At the same time, hydrodiplomacy aims at securing cooperation at transboundary scale and fostering conflicts resolution among riparian countries. The research proposes a Hydrodiplomacy Index (HyDI) that integrates climate change and water diplomacy aspects as a qualitative tool for transboundary river basins’ management under climate change. The latter is considered as the a) volume and nature of climate change-related studies on surface cross-border waters, and b) climate change international agreements ratified by the riparian countries and the corresponding implementation progress. In terms of hydrodiplomacy, the features that are taken into consideration are the a) current ecological and chemical status of the transboundary waters, b) flood vulnerability of boundary areas, c) mankind pressures, d) socio-political tensions, e) bilateral agreements on water management, f) common legal frameworks, and g) outputs of the Sustainable Development Goals index for transboundary water management. The five transboundary river basins that Greece shares with neighbouring countries are the case study area, and the HyDI quantifies in which way climate change consists of a potential key-parameter for the management of transboundary waters.

Increasing pressure on shared water resources has often been a driver for the development and utilisation of water resource models (WRMs) to inform planning and management decisions. With an increasing emphasis on regional decision-making among competing actors as opposed to top-down and authoritative directives, the need for integrated knowledge and water diplomacy efforts across federal and international rivers provides a test bed for the ability of WRMs to operate within complex historical, social, environmental, institutional and political contexts. This paper draws on theories of sustainability science to examine the role of WRMs to inform transboundary water resource governance in large river basins. We survey designers and users of WRMs in the Colorado River Basin in North America and the Murray-Darling Basin in southeastern Australia. Water governance in such federal rivers challenges inter-governmental and multi-level coordination and we explore these dynamics through the application of WRMs. The development pathways of WRMs are found to influence their uptake and acceptance as decision support tools. Furthermore, we find evidence that WRMs are used as boundary objects and perform the functions of ‘boundary work’ between scientists, decision-makers and stakeholders in the midst of regional environmental changes.

The transboundary Sun-Koshi River basin, characterized by intricate topography and geo-climatic diversity, has encountered distinct periods of droughts significantly impacting downstream river discharge. This study focuses on assessing temporal and spatial patterns of meteorological drought using SPI and SPEI indices, gauging their influence on river discharge through hydro-meteorological station data and the HEC–HMS model. Severe drought episodes were notably observed in 2010 and 2015. In 2010, prominent drought occurrences extended beyond Nepal's border into China. Conversely, in 2015, Jiri, Okhaldhunga, and Salleri experienced heightened drought conditions. Spatially, over 99% of the basin area experienced drought, varying from moderate to extreme magnitudes during 2010 and 2015. The estimated annual rainfall and basin outlet discharge were 1,800 mm, 1,907 mm, and 1,899 m3/s, 1,086 m3/s in 2010 and 2015, respectively. During drought periods, the stations indicated significantly reduced discharge, indicating a marked departure from normal conditions across the basin. Ultimately, station data performance and the HEC–HMS SCS curve number model showed that discharge in the Sunkoshi River basin is profoundly impacted by drought, notably influencing rainfall intensity on monthly, seasonal, and annual scales. The smaller basins discharge more accurate results compared with the larger outlet basins.

Growing population and water demand have increased pressure on water resources in various parts of the globe, including many transboundary river basins. While the impacts of upstream water use on downstream water availability have been analysed in many of these international river basins, this has not been systematically done at the global scale using coherent and comparable datasets. In this study, we aim to assess the change in downstream water stress due to upstream water use in the world’s transboundary river basins. Water stress was first calculated considering only local water use of each sub-basin based on country-basin mesh, then compared with the situation when upstream water use was subtracted from downstream water availability. We found that water stress was generally already high when considering only local water use, affecting 0.95–1.44 billion people or 33%–51% of the population in transboundary river basins. After accounting for upstream water use, stress level increased by at least 1 percentage-point for 30–65 sub-basins, affecting 0.29–1.13 billion people. Altogether 288 out of 298 middle-stream and downstream sub-basin areas experienced some change in stress level. Further, we assessed whether there is a link between increased water stress due to upstream water use and the number of conflictive and cooperative events in the transboundary river basins, as captured by two prominent databases. No direct relationship was found. This supports the argument that conflicts and cooperation events originate from a combination of different drivers, among which upstream-induced water stress may play a role. Our findings contribute to better understanding of upstream–downstream dynamics in water stress to help address water allocation problems.

The Da River, the principal tributary of the Red River system, plays a strategic role in hydropower generation and water supply for northern Vietnam. The hydrological regime of its upper basin has been increasingly influenced by the combined impacts of climate change and transboundary reservoir regulation. This study presents the first integrated assessment of these two factors within a unified SWAT-SUFI-2 modelling framework to evaluate the streamflow alterations in the upper Da River basin. Results indicate that under natural flow conditions without reservoir regulation, climate change intensifies flow extremes, with mean flood-season discharge increasing by approximately 2.5 times, while the number of low-flow months (Q &lt; P₅) during the dry season rises 17 - fold compared with the baseline period (1980 - 2003). In contrast, during the reservoir operation phase (post-2007), the flood peak magnitude decreased by 17.5%, whereas dry-season discharge increased by 11.7%, effectively flattening the seasonal hydrograph. When both factors are considered jointly, reservoirs dominate the redistribution of seasonal flows, and climate change amplifies hydrological variability and extremes. This study provides the first quantitative evidence of the combined impacts of climate change and reservoir regulation on the transboundary Da River basin, offering a scientific basis for adaptive reservoir operation, data sharing, and integrated downstream water-risk management.