Salinity Management by Use of Low Quality Water

Hughes, T.C., Orlovsky, S., & Narayanan, R. (1983). Salinity Management by Use of Low Quality Water. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-83-018

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Abstract

The work reported here exemplifies one of the major general research directions of the former Resources and Environment (REN) Area and also of the present Impacts of Human Activities on Environmental Systems (IMP) Project concerned with the analysis of conditions for stable "coexistence" of interacting socio-economic and environmental systems. Making this coexistence sustainable requires regulating the whole system by means of economic, social, and other mechanisms or policies, and the objective is to structure the analysis of those policies effectively using systems analytical methodologies and computerized systems of models. In this work, these general research issues were considered using a more specific example of salinity management in the Colorado River Basin, and a more specific research goal was to analyze regulatory policies capable of motivating water users in the basin towards using low quality water for electric energy production. The methodological framework of this study suggests a two-stage decompositional analytical procedure: a) generating rational scenarios of the desired "coexistence" and b) analysis of regulatory policies capable of making those scenarios realizable, taking into account behavioral aspects of the policy-makers involved. This paper outlines this framework, introduces a reader to the specifics of the Colorado salinity problem and describes the mathematical models developed for the scenario generation stage of the analysis, together with some computational results.

This work was funded in part by an ICSAR (International Cooperation for Systems Analysis Research) grant.

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