Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to Simulate the Sustainability of Water Resources and Urbanization

Abstract

Urban water resources should be managed to meet conflicting demands for environmental health, economic prosperity, and social equity for present and future generations. While the sustainability of water resources can depend on dynamic interactions among natural, social, and infrastructure systems, typical water resource planning and management approaches are based on methodologies that ignore feedbacks and adaptations among these systems. This research develops and demonstrates a new complex adaptive systems approach to model the dynamic interactions among population growth, land-use change, the hydrologic cycle, residential water use, and interbasin transfers. Agent-based and cellular automaton models, representing consumers and policymakers who make land- and water-use decisions, are coupled with hydrologic models. The framework is applied for an illustrative case study to simulate urbanization and the water supply system over a long-term planning horizon. Results indicate that interactions among the decentralized decisions of individual residents can significantly influence system-wide sustainability. Adaptive management policies are included to restrict the water use and land use of consumers as the availability of water decreases. These strategies are simulated and assessed based on their abilities to increase the sustainability of the water supply system under the stresses of population growth, land-use change, and drought.