Authors
Emily Zechman Berglund, Sankar Arumugam
Publication date
2014
Source
12-01-W
Publisher
Water Resources Research Institute of the University of North Carolina
Description
The management of water resources requires careful planning to balance water supply and demand. Under increasing population growth and land use change through urbanization, water shortages may become increasingly frequent, and climate change will alter the availability and timing of water from expected levels. While long-term water supply planning is conventionally based on projections of population growth, demands, and system capacity under a stationary climate, the sustainability of water resources depends on the dynamic interactions among the environmental, technological, and social characteristics of the water system and local population. These interactions can cause supply-demand imbalances at various temporal scales, and the response of consumers to water use regulations will impact future water availability. To address the challenges of water resources management and provide insight to system dynamics, new modeling is needed that goes beyond simple assumptions on water availability, population growth and demand increases, to explicitly incorporate the feedbacks among these systems and their impacts on water availability. The research described here develops an integrated urban water management framework with capabilities to evaluate demand-side and supply-side management strategies. This research establishes a dynamic modeling approach to understand the supply-demand dynamics and feedbacks arising from urban growth dynamics, consumer behaviors, and potential changes in climate and land use. An agent-based modeling approach is developed to couple models of consumers and utility …