FEARLUS-W: An Agent-Based Model of River Basin Land Use and Water Management

This paper describes a spatially-explicit agent-based model of river basin land use and water management. The model is being implemented within a project aimed at investigating ways of synthesising stakeholder priorities, taking the EU Water Framework Directive as a case study. There are many human activities that take place in a river basin and can alter the ecological status of the water, and there are also many activities whose outcomes depend on that ecological status. These interactions between the socio-economic and the ecological aspects of the river basin are shaped by the spatial distribution of the situation. Water users upstream generally have an advantage over those downstream: the first chance to use (and perhaps abstract or pollute) the water. The flowing nature of water creates asymmetries in the interactions between users. FEARLUS-W is a spatiallyexplicit agent-based model built to increase our understanding of these complex interactions and explore how common-pool resource problems in river basin management might be tamed through socio-economic interactions between stakeholders (primarily rural land managers), and through management strategies aimed at shaping these interactions. FEARLUS-W is being constructed within an extended version of an existing spatiallyexplicit agent-based model of land use change, FEARLUS (Polhill, Gotts and Law, 2001), drawing on theories of common-pool resource use, and on survey work among stakeholders. The main extensions to FEARLUS deal with water, water flow and water pollution on the one hand and allow for agents with multiple and potentially conflicting top-level goals on the other. FEARLUS-W: An Agent-Based Model of River Basin Land Use and Water Management Introduction__________________________________________________ 1 Clean water as a common-pool resource ___________________________ 2 Why agents? _________________________________________________ 3 The existing FEARLUS model___________________________________ 4 Context: the Water Framework Directive project_____________________ 5 Modelling CPR dilemmas: the symmetrical case _____________________ 6 Agents with multiple dimensions of utility__________________________ 8 Representing social approval___________________________________ 8 The decision making algorithm_________________________________ 9 Water, water flow and water pollution: the asymmetrical case _________ 12 Conclusions_________________________________________________ 17 Acknowledgement ___________________________________________ 18 References__________________________________________________ 18