Socio-hydrological modeling of the tradeoff between flood control and hydropower provided by the Columbia River Treaty
- 1School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
- 2Department of Hydraulics and Sanitation, São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil
- 3Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
- 4Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
- These authors contributed equally to this work.
- 1School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
- 2Department of Hydraulics and Sanitation, São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil
- 3Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
- 4Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
- These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract. The Columbia River Treaty (CRT) signed between the United States and Canada in 1961 is known as one of the most successful transboundary water treaties. Under continued cooperation, both countries equitably share collective responsibilities of reservoir operations, and flood control and hydropower benefits from treaty dams. As the balance of benefits is the key factor of cooperation, future cooperation could be challenged by external social and environmental factors which were not originally anticipated, or change in the social preferences of the two actors. To understand the robustness of cooperation dynamics we address two research questions – i) How does social and environmental change influence cooperation dynamics? and ii) How do social preferences influence the probability of cooperation for both actors? We analyzed infrastructural, hydrological, economic, social, and environmental data to inform the development of a socio-hydrological system dynamics model. The model simulates the dynamics of flood control and hydropower benefit sharing as a function of the probability to cooperate, which in turn is affected by the share of benefits. The model is used to evaluate scenarios that represent environmental and institutional change, and changes in political characteristics based on social preferences. Our findings show that stronger institutional capacity ensures equitable sharing of benefits over the long term. Under current CRT, the utility of cooperation is always higher for Canada than non-cooperation which is in contrast to the U.S. The probability to cooperate for each country is lowest when they are self-interested but fluctuates in other social preferences scenarios.
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Ashish Shrestha et al.
Status: final response (author comments only)
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RC1: 'Comment on hess-2021-578', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Jan 2022
The manuscript titled “Socio-hydrological modeling of the tradeoff between flood control and hydropower provided by the Columbia River Treaty” by Shrestha et al. understand the cooperation dynamics in Columbia River Basin through investigating how and what factors drives the two countries into a successful cooperative regime in the past, and what would the balance shift in face of the social, institutional and environmental changes. The paper is generally well written and structured. The concept of the paper is interesting, and crucial one for understanding the underlying mechanism of a successful cooperation dynamic and transboundary co-evolutionary dynamics in general. On top of that, this study provides valuable insights and reference for the negotiations of the treaty within and beyond Columbia River. I recommend this paper being accepted with some minor revisions.
General Comments:
- The manuscript can generally be improved with a more solid literature review in the introduction. More specifically the authors are encouraged to review on the existing studies in understanding transboundary rivers management from different disciplines, and through the lens of conflict and cooperation dynamics. The selection of variables that influence on the choice of cooperation, i.e. institutional capacity, social and behavioral preferences could be articulated.
Detailed comments:
- Line 49: “actors’ decisions are guided by their or social preferences”, delete “or”;
- In the introduction line 50-52, the authors stated that “actors exhibit social preferences if the actor not only cares about their own material benefit but also cares about the material benefits of other actors”, this is not clear, please re-structure this sentence.
- Line 64: update the number of global transboundary river basin with 310 rivers, see McCracken & Wolf 2019 for the most updated info on this:
“Updating the Register of International River Basins of the world” by McCracken & Wolf 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2019.1572497
- Line 70, what is “social comparison”?
- Paragraph 89 – 100 introduced the challenges of cooperation in transboundary river basins through listing the possible impacting factors, i.e. political/economic power, geographic locations, followed by the four types of benefits, which were a bit of a sudden jump, please consider re-structure this paragraph.
- Line 121- 135, descriptions on social preferences, there are four types of social preferences stated, what are the differences between the social preferences and social motives? There are also four types of social motives: individualism, competition, cooperation and altruism, how is the social preference differentiate with the social motives and why social preferences is selected here?
- Line 150, this research builds upon the work of Lu et al. (2021), could the author explicitly explain the novelty developed for the model used in this paper, what are the advancement?
- Figure 2, some variables illustrated in the figure are not explained, i.e. “utility for cooperation”, “Utility for no cooperation”, etc., also, the feedback loop illustrated could be improved by differentiating variables by different types, i.e. economic variable, hydrological variables, social variables, etc., to reflect the infrastructural, hydrological, economic, social, and environmental aspects being considered in this model.
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Ashish Shrestha, 09 Feb 2022
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://hess.copernicus.org/preprints/hess-2021-578/hess-2021-578-AC1-supplement.pdf
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RC2: 'Comment on hess-2021-578', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Jan 2022
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AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Ashish Shrestha, 09 Feb 2022
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://hess.copernicus.org/preprints/hess-2021-578/hess-2021-578-AC2-supplement.pdf
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AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Ashish Shrestha, 09 Feb 2022
Ashish Shrestha et al.
Ashish Shrestha et al.
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