Analysis of Water Resources Alternatives to Improve Water Allocation on the Conchos Basin During Drought Situations

Abstract

The Conchos Mexican basin is part of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin. This basin provides water to irrigate 120,000 ha and water supply to one million of population and its different activities in the state of Chihuahua. Moreover, this basin has historically delivered most of the water, around 54%, to the United States of the six Mexican rivers included on the international Water Treaty signed between these two countries in 1944. Drought occurrences, such as the 1950's and 1990's, have demonstrated the basin's vulnerability. This has produced not only considerable economic losses on the region but also generated economic problems and political frictions with United States given the inability of México to comply with the Water Treaty's specifications. Because of this problematic, the lack of understanding of the water resources management, and the poor development and application of some new introduced water resource policies such as water right transfers, the present study is focused to develop two research lines: 1) to create a Decision support System (DSS), a lumped semi-distributed model, created using System Dynamics (SD) and running in monthly basis. For the short and long term, the DSS carries out simulation of water resources allocation, reservoir operation policies, increased water distribution efficiencies and temporary water rights transfers. And 2) to make an analysis of the current water right allocation mechanism aimed to understand more this current policy from an institutional perspective. The final expected outcome of this research is to identify alternatives oriented not only to improve the water resources management on the Conchos basin but also to facilitate México’s compliance with the Treaty requirements.