Water accounting for stressed river basins based on water resources management models

María Pedro-Monzonís; Abel Solera; Javier Ferrer; Joaquín Andreu; Teodoro Estrela

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.04.161

Water accounting for stressed river basins based on water resources management models

Sci Total Environ. 2016 Sep 15:565:181-190. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.04.161. Epub 2016 May 7.

Authors

María Pedro-Monzonís¹, Abel Solera², Javier Ferrer³, Joaquín Andreu², Teodoro Estrela³

Affiliations

¹ Research Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering (IIAMA), Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain. Electronic address: mapedmon@upv.es.
² Research Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering (IIAMA), Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
³ Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar (CHJ) Jucar River Basin Authority, Valencia, Spain.

PMID: 27161139
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.04.161

Abstract

Water planning and the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) represent the best way to help decision makers to identify and choose the most adequate alternatives among other possible ones. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W) is displayed as a tool for the building of water balances in a river basin, providing a standard approach to achieve comparability of the results between different territories. The target of this paper is to present the building up of a tool that enables the combined use of hydrological models and water resources models to fill in the SEEA-W tables. At every step of the modelling chain, we are capable to build the asset accounts and the physical water supply and use tables according to SEEA-W approach along with an estimation of the water services costs. The case study is the Jucar River Basin District (RBD), located in the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain which as in other many Mediterranean basins is currently water-stressed. To guide this work we have used PATRICAL model in combination with AQUATOOL Decision Support System (DSS). The results indicate that for the average year the total use of water in the district amounts to 15,143hm(3)/year, being the Total Water Renewable Water Resources 3909hm(3)/year. On the other hand, the water service costs in Jucar RBD amounts to 1634 million € per year at constant 2012 prices. It is noteworthy that 9% of these costs correspond to non-conventional resources, such as desalinated water, reused water and water transferred from other regions.

Keywords: AQUACCOUNTS; Jucar River Basin District; System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W); Water accounts; Water resources systems.