Project website: https://www.watertheft.eu/

Objectives

Water theft represents a challenge, accounting for more than 30% of global water supply losses and persisting despite political efforts. The non-linear adaptive responses of economic agents, particularly irrigators, have complicated efforts to predict feedback loops and anticipate cascading consequences. These dynamics exacerbate water theft, leading to depletion of water bodies and hindering sustainable development. The WaterTheft project team, funded by the European Research Council, aims to predict the adaptive behavior of individual agents over time within complex water-human systems. The project will integrate mathematical programming methods and experimental economics with hydrological modeling and ensemble experiments. The goal is to be able to consistently and repeatably predict nonlinear sociohydrological phenomena that arise in space and time and to identify their triggers.

General activities

The objective is to break new ground by developing a novel approach to predict adaptive surprises in complex water-human systems. To this end, the following tasks will be performed:

• Combine microeconomic mathematical programming models with behavioral economics methods to predict the nonlinear adaptive responses of individual agents over time.
• Integrate the behavior of individual agents into agent-based and macroeconomic models to predict nonlinear spatial trends arising from human interactions at local and global levels.
• Endogenize these socioeconomic processes in water and human systems models to predict nonlinear sociohydrological phenomena.
• Use ensemble experiments to quantify scenario and model uncertainties, and predict nonlinearities that may arise or be amplified due to model parameterization/structure problems or scenario design.

Expected results

These innovations will predict the emergence of nonlinearities and track their impact on coupled water-human systems, thus uncovering adaptive surprises and their drivers. The methods will be applied empirically and tested in three living laboratories in Spain, Australia and the United States that suffer from water theft.

This project is funded by the European Union’s HORIZONTE EUROPE research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 101124884.