Coordinating Across Water Management Silos: Application of Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization Approach for Altering Irrigation Water Rights in a River Basin
Abstract Submission: The management of water resources is fragmented, which limits our ability to effectively and strategically address major societal challenges, such as droughts or policy changes, in a coordinated way. This leads to inadequate adaptation to both sudden and ongoing environmental stresses. Although breaking current governance and policy silos to create an integrated water management approach often reach an impasse, this study aims to explore a new approach to water management that facilitates and improves coordination across existing silos. Specifically, we employ a multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDAO) framework that allows siloed decision makers to adjust their individual water rights decisions independently over time, while also collaborating in regional-level coordination of total water allocation over time. This form of optimization approach that allows decentralized decision makers at local scale to coordinate with centralized regional decision makers is compared with a fully centralized optimization approach in this study for irrigation water rights holders in the testbed region of Umatilla river basin. While the results in this presentation will focus on the management of irrigation water rights, they will also illustrate the benefits of MDAO for coordinating adaptation planning in a river basin over time that consists of multiple siloed decision makers.
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