Using evolutionary game theory to resolve water-sharing strategies.
Increasing water demands across the globe have led to many global disagreements and disputes. Freshwater is a vital resource to humans and the environment, and riparian countries have faced difficulties with sharing this resource for decades. New research, however, has uncovered that cooperative sharing of these resources will yield much greater benefits to the parties involved when compared to non-cooperation.
To complete these analyses, researchers at the University of Tehran in Iran utilized an evolutionary game method to analyze the long-term water-sharing strategies of transboundary riparian countries and is one of the first of its kind. This study specifically looked at tripartite games that involve one upstream country, and two downstream ones. Utilizing an evolutionary game, in this case, is more beneficial than a traditional one, seeing as though it considers and encompasses the uncertainty of countries’ strategies.
The study concluded that the “decisions [made by] upstream or downstream countries depend on the behavior of the other countries over time,” and yielded six equilibrium points at which represent the probabilities of cooperation from each of the three countries.
This is interesting to think about regarding the material we have covered in class. Personally, for example, I’m also double majoring in both Information Science and Environment & Sustainability. I’m learning a lot about resource management and environmental economics and this intersection between the two was incredibly fascinating to me. Long-term water-sharing decisions, and usually resource management decisions in general, are rarely set and stone and are changed and amended with the resource itself. Thus, this is an appropriate, and surprising application of game theory, and the topics we have been discussing in class.