Flooding in Pakistan

Project by James Rising (with Prof. John Mutter):

This research has two complementary directions: studying the projected evolution of flood variability in the Himalayan floodplain with respect to glacier melt. What portion of the current flooding along Himalayan rivers is attributable to glacier melt, and how will that change as the glaciers retreat?  Second, I’m focusing on the economic consequences of floods for Pakistan, using an inter-sectoral model of their economy.  When floods hit agriculture, for example, how does that trickle down to other sectors, and what sectors are most likely to be unaffected?

Distributive Impacts of Dams and Governmental Responses in County-level in China

Project by Xiaojia Bao:

This paper initially built a theoretical model for governments’ fiscal response with respect to the distributive impacts of dams along a river basin. The model claimed that upstream counties should get compensated, while downstream counties should compensate or transfer out, if the local governments were functioning efficiently. Then the paper verified the distributive impacts of dams on different areas along a river basin using empirical data in county level in China from 2000 to 2008. Empirical analysis indicated that dam construction and finished dams mainly had distributive impacts on agricultural economic outcome variables, such as primary industry valued added per capita and grain production.  Local counties would suffer from agricultural loss due to the disruption from dam construction work and land loss for reservoir construction, but those areas were compensated correspondingly, which can be seen from the reduced deficit percentage. Upstream counties suffered from deteriorated economic outcome indicators both in agricultural and non-agricultural industries with GDP per capita decreased by 1540 RMB and net income per capita in rural households decreased by 147 RMB, while they got compensated to some extend through the revenue increase (close to 87 RMB per capita). Downstream counties benefited from dam construction on agricultural production, mainly in grain production and meat production, corresponding to a decrease in the expenditure (43 RMB per capita) and increase in revenue (122 RMB per capita).

Rural Household Residential Water Use Behavior in Northern China

Project by Xiaojia Bao:

This paper modeled household water use in a water-scarce rural village in Northern China using household level data. Several household characteristics were identified to impact water use significantly. Household size shows a scale-economy effect, with a coefficient close to 0.25. Gender structure and characteristics of household head don’t show a significant effect. In addition, households adjust their water use as a response to weather variability.  The increase of average monthly precipitation by 1mm corresponds to 0.1-0.2% decrease in per capita water use . And the increase of average monthly temperature by 1 degree corresponds to 2-5% increase in per capita water use. The response of households’ water use to weather is state-dependent. Generally, smaller and younger households increase water use more as a response to temperature increase, but decrease water use less as a response to precipitation increase.

Groundwater Management under Multiple Uncertainty

Project by Chandra Kiran:
There is a vast literature on groundwater management when recharge is stochastic and when demand is known. Given the developed country setting of this literature, there is no corresponding focus on stochastic demand, especially when demand is a function of the price of crops. In a setting with high price variability, we illustrate that it is important to account for this source of uncertainty, for two reasons: first, the magnitude of this uncertainty can easily exceed that of natural recharge and second, the implications for risk averse farmers of multiple sources of uncertainty is substantial. In particular, the effect on steady state distribution of groundwater stock of increases in variability are very uncertain. We provide conditions under which increases in uncertainty lead to reduction in optimal withdrawal.

The Flood in the Desert

Dealing with spatial and temporal variation
in water availability in a data-sparse environment
Project by Anna Tompsett
The project focuses on an area of the Niger Inland Delta near
Tombouctou, Mali, where there is very little data available for water
and agricultural management. Both traditional and modern agricultural
systems are however extremely dependent on the spatial and temporal
extent of the annual flood. The project aims to use landsat images to
generate maps of the area flooded with given probability at a given
time of the year.