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A Comparison Between Conflict Resolution and Multicriteria Decision Making in a Groundwater Management Conflict in Mexico

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Pp. 817-825 in Proceedings of the World Congress of Computers in Agriculture and Natural Resources (13-15, March 2002, Iguacu Falls, Brazil)  701P0301.(doi:10.13031/2013.8416)
Authors:   Raquel Salazar and Ferenc Szidarovszky
Keywords:   Optimization Techniques, Systems Modeling, Water Management

Conflict resolution and Multicriteria Decision Making are applied to a groundwater management conflict between economic benefits and environmental consequences of aquifer overdraft in the Alto Rio Lerma Irrigation District (ARLID) located in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico. The players are the water users in the irrigation district and the community. The economic attributes are obtained by using linear programming to identify optimal cropping patterns. The Groundwater Loading Effects of Agricultural Management Systems (GLEAMS) was used to simulate the amounts of nitrates, and pesticides in runoff and percolation which account for some environmental attributes. The aquifer overexploitation coefficient and pumping cost were considered for each groundwater withdrawal scenario. The objective is to maximize economic benefits but at the same time minimize the negative environmental consequences in the region. The decision variable is the groundwater withdrawals. The Pareto frontier was generated representing the trade off between economic benefits and negative environmental effects. The conflict resolution methods applied were: The Non-symmetric Nash solution, Non-symmetric Kalai- Smorodinsky solution, Non-symmetric area monotonic solution and Non-symmetric equal loss solution. Among the multicriteria optimization methods we applied distance minimizing from the ideal point based on l1, l2 and l 8metrics. And distance maximizing from nadir point based on l2 metrics. The results obtained by using different methods are analyzed and compared.

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