Enter Note Done
Go to previous page in this tab
Session
  • Presentation | H21J: Water and Society: Water Resources Management and Policy in a Changing World III Oral
  • Oral
  • Bookmark Icon
  • H21J-06: Assessing and Managing Interrelated Water Supply and Financial Risks in the Colorado River Basin – a Dynamic Basin-scale Approach.
  • Schedule
    Notes
  • Location Icon217-219
    NOLA CC
    Set Timezone
  •  
    View Map

Generic 'disconnected' Message
Author(s):
Iain Burnett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (First Author, Presenting Author)
Gregory Characklis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Patrick Reed, Cornell University
Sai Veena Sunkara, Cornell University
Travis Thurber, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory


The Colorado River Basin faces serious water shortage risks that threaten the environment and create major financial risks for cities, agriculture, and other essential services. Traditional water allocation models often cannot help decision-makers because they oversimplify water rights, assume unchanging demand, and ignore real-world behavior and policies. This comprehensive model addresses these shortcomings using newly available detailed water rights data to provide fine-grained analysis of water distribution and economic impacts at the individual level. Unlike previous models, this tool accounts for uncertainties in climate, demand, and policy to calculate the probability of shortages and associated costs under different scenarios. The model is applied to the Colorado River Basin's growing water crisis to assess user-specific water supply and financial outcomes. The open-source Python framework can be extended to analyze other institutionally complex river basins.



Scientific Discipline
Suggested Itineraries
Neighborhood
Type
Main Session
Discussion