Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 58, September 2019, 101972
Global Environmental Change

Sustainable groundwater management: How long and what will it take?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101972Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Effective regulations and the way they are implemented must account for culture.

  • The world values survey is used to characterise social norms in different societies.

  • Cultural and regulatory efforts are needed to meet global groundwater objectives.

  • The role of community leaders and unconditional rule-followers is key.

Abstract

Groundwater depletion is arguably one of humanity's greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century. With Sustainable Development Goals only a decade away, water authorities around the world are in the urgent need for concrete and targeted measures to ensure that communities adhere to groundwater management policies as rapidly and as effectively as possible. In this paper, we combine computational social science, groundwater modelling and empirical data from the World Values Survey to generate future ensembles of hydro-social trajectories under alternative courses of management and social action or inaction. Our simulations shed new light on the role that cultural values can play in shaping the societal trajectories and norms that emerge when resources are either allocated or not sufficiently allocated to monitor compliance, issue fines, engage community leaders, and deter rule-breakers. This study presents a new approach to explore and evaluate the capacity of existing and future management actions to steer groundwater systems towards sustainable trajectories, to forecast the celerity and timing of social transformations at the inter-decadal scale, and to help nations identify the most pertinent management options under institutional, political, social, and/or cultural constraints. The methods presented here are broadly applicable to support strategic decisions that rely on the monitoring, enforcement, and compliance of environmental regulations.

Introduction

Groundwater is being rapidly depleted worldwide (Aeschbach-Hertig and Gleeson, 2012, Famiglietti et al., 2011, Richey et al., 2015, Rodell et al., 2009). Much of this depletion is linked to irrigation in agricultural regions (e.g., the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the North China Plain, the North and South Arabian Peninsula, Western Mexico, central USA and the California Central Valley) where major food bowls and population centres are located (Gleeson et al., 2012b, Margat and Van der Gun, 2013). Recent hydro-economic analyses reveal that unsustainable rates of groundwater abstraction threaten water and food security not only locally (Wada et al., 2012), but also globally via international trade links (Dalin et al., 2017).

In most stressed aquifer systems, the preferred option has been to regulate groundwater abstraction by setting and enforcing sustainable allocation limits (Aeschbach-Hertig and Gleeson, 2012; Margat and Van der Gun, 2013, Shah et al., 2003, Theesfeld, 2010). To be effective, these policies require that the “rules of the game” are socially accepted, adhered to and enforced. Adherence to the rules however cannot be assured as water users may choose to either resist, ignore (by omission, purposely or due to misinformation) or violate restrictions imposed on them. Although strict monitoring and penalties may induce people to play by the rules, such show of force can erode trust between water agencies and users (Gelcich et al., 2006, Jones and Andriamarovololona, 2008, Ostrom, 1990, Ostrom and Walker, 2005). In the developing world, where much of the groundwater depletion is happening (Aeschbach-Hertig and Gleeson, 2012, Margat and Van der Gun, 2013), monitoring millions of water users is likely an impractical and expensive solution (Shah, 2009, Shah et al., 2003).

Understanding the drivers of compliance and their sensitivity to policy instruments and cultural factors remains a major challenge for even the most adept water agencies in developed countries (Margat and Van der Gun, 2013). Empirical surveys and social research typically take years to plan and develop while consuming considerable time, effort and resources in the process. Much of social research on the issue of compliance is site-specific and results derived from it are often difficult to generalise and extrapolate to other regions. Alternative methods of enquiry into the attitudes of water users towards groundwater regulations are needed to gain a preliminary understanding of how hydro-social systems could be steered towards local, national and international socio-environmental objectives. INTERPOL (INTERPOL-UNEP, 2016) reports that 30–50% of the global water supply is illegally obtained, with water theft expected to rise due to drought and climate change (Water Crimes, 2017). If this trajectory continues, the UN (2016) projects a 40% shortfall in water availability by 2030. Reversing this trend requires substantial improvements to compliance and enforcement because no matter how many novel governance tools are designed, it will all be insufficient if compliance and enforcement is absent or inadequate (Felbab-Brown, 2017). The role that adherence to groundwater management will play in the efforts of water agencies to achieve the desired groundwater outcomes can be purposefully explored through computational social science models, which have proven to be a valuable tool for synthesising empirical and theoretical knowledge on human cooperation, cultural values, and social norms (Castilla-Rho et al., 2017).

Previous work introducing the Groundwater Commons Game (Castilla-Rho et al., 2017) ascertained the long-term efficacy of groundwater management policies in the context of irrigated agriculture. This work however left a number of open questions for further research, of which elucidating possible future trajectories towards sustainable groundwater management is arguably the most important. For hydro-social systems to embark on sustainable trajectories, management policies must trigger both short- and long-term social transformations. These policies will be effective to the extent that they, in the short-term, promote rapid acceptability and internalisation of groundwater abstraction rules, and in the long-term maintain a stable and cooperative social stance towards groundwater regulations. Understanding the timing and speed at which a high degree of regulatory compliance may or may not develop is essential to meet the pressing geo-political and geo-economic challenges associated with water scarcity across the globe (World Economic Forum, 2019). Ensuring optimal compliance with rules limiting groundwater extraction is particularly important in order to respond to present and growing risks of water theft (Matthews, 2017).

How long and what will it take to embark on sustainable groundwater management trajectories? To answer this question, we build and expand on our previous steady-state analysis of the Groundwater Commons Game (Castilla-Rho et al., 2017) by investigating and ensemble of temporal trajectories triggered by three generic management decisions designed to steer the behaviours of resource users, namely: (a) the level of regulatory enforcement (i.e., decisions relating to the resources allocated to monitoring compliance and monetary fines), (b) the monitoring style (random or targeted monitoring), and (c) the adoption of active norm management strategies (engaging leaders and deterring rule-breakers). We investigated four case studies where groundwater is under intensive use—the Murray–Darling Basin (Australia), the California Central Valley (USA) and the transboundary Punjab aquifer (India and Pakistan). These four countries and their trade partners account for about 80% of the total groundwater depletion embedded in international trade of crop commodities (Dalin et al., 2017). They also broadly represent the four cultural typologies or ‘ways of life’ defined by Cultural Theory (individualist, fatalist, hierarchist, and egalitarian) (Verweij, 2000). When combined with the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org), these cultural typologies provide a robust empirical basis of comparison of human values and beliefs at a global scale.

Section snippets

Methods

The coupled socio-hydrology model used for this study is shown conceptually in Fig. 1, Supplementary Fig. 2, and described in detail in Castilla-Rho et al. (2017). The ODD+D model documentation(Grimm et al., 2006, Grimm et al., 2010, Müller et al., 2013) with details on the conceptualisation, assumptions, variables, equations, underlying theory, empirical data, and validation based on a field survey of water licensees across three jurisdictions of the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia) can be

Enforcement: monitoring and fines (MS1)

Fig. 5a–d summarise the transient response of our simulated coupled hydro-social systems over a management period of 50 years, for each of the case studies and across four enforcement scenarios (mf, Mf, mF, MF, see Section 2). Our simulations show that increasing monitoring alone (Mf) (i.e. increasing the number of farmers inspected) does not lead to substantial increases in compliance compared to lax regulation (mf) (Fig. 5, top row). This result emphasises the complementarity of monitoring

Discussion and conclusions

Although our conceptual but empirically-grounded model and its findings can lead to general policy recommendations, they are unlikely to be universally prescriptive. What is likely, however, is that the numerous actions and activities needed to deliver on groundwater objectives will need to include bottom-up approaches where management decisions are designed and implemented by local water authorities (Ostrom, 1990, Poteete et al., 2010). In order to effectively resolve conflicts between

Code availability

An updated and fully documented implementation of the Groundwater Commons Game is available to download from the GitHub repository (https://github.com/juancastilla/Groundwater_Commons_Game). Agent-based simulations were conducted in NetLogo. R and Python code developed for statistical analysis and data analysis, and the ODD+D model documentation are also included in the Github repository.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

J.C. Castilla-Rho: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. R. Rojas: Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - review & editing. M.S. Andersen: Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. C. Holley: Funding acquisition, Investigation, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing. G. Mariethoz: Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review &

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge CSIRO Land and Water and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) for providing funding which led to the completion and dissemination of this study. The Australian Research Council and the National Water Commission (through the NCGRT) funded part of this research through an ARC Linkage Grant with DPI Water (LP130100967) and an ARC Discovery (DP190101584). DPI Water provided institutional support, provision of mailing databases, testing of research questions with

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