Navigating Country-level Inequities in the Transboundary Zambezi Watercourse with Operational Flexibility and Infrastructure Expansion

Abstract Submission: Geographical factors, uneven development, and varied institutional capacities often mean energy and water supply risks fall asymmetrically across countries in transboundary river basins. Cooperative and coordinated transboundary basin management can yield net collective gains, and game theory and hydro-economic modeling have been used to explore stable compensatory schemes that distribute the surplus; however, such approaches are generally limited in scope to a single sector of water management, a small number of competing operational paradigms, and stationary hydrology. Therefore, these approaches can underrepresent the dynamics of conflicting river basin objectives and hydrologic uncertainty, particularly under climate change. Here, we apply multi-objective robust decision-making (MORDM) to develop and navigate equitable and resilient solutions to transboundary river basin management of the Zambezi River watercourse, where planned dams would double the basin's total hydropower capacity. Using prioritarian and leximin ordering, we incorporate country-level equity in hydropower generation into the optimization of energy, food, and environmental objectives at the river basin scale. We show how the distribution of hydropower risk between countries varies across operational tradeoffs and how infrastructure expansion can exacerbate and reduce inequality. Our findings demonstrate the potential of using more dynamic approaches to transboundary water resource management in an era of increasing climate uncertainty.

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