Water is essential for crops, so it is necessary to anticipate possible future scenarios where complications with this resource may arise. With a transdisciplinary approach, the Fondecyt project led by the academic of the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering UdeC, Dr. Mario Lillo-Saavedra, will allow the identification, based on the simulation of socio-hydrological scenarios, of potential conflicts in the basin, such as the Longaví.
A transdisciplinary team of researchers led by Dr. Mario Lillo-Saavedra, a professor at the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Concepción (FIAUdeC), will develop a model that will identify future water conflicts at the basin level, a project that was awarded funding from the Fondecyt Regular competition of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID).
This is “Modeling based on socio-hydrological agents to evaluate future water conflicts at the basin scale,” one of the 42 projects led by UdeC researchers that were awarded Regular Fondecyt resources.
The computer expert and researcher at the Department of Mechanization and Energy of FIAUdeC, explained that “Water management and the conflicts it generates have become an issue with social value that lacks a solid formulation, both conceptually and operationally.” In this regard, he argued that “new approaches to water management solutions must go beyond the static comparison between water supply and demand.”
For this reason, she stated that this innovative project responds to the need to incorporate into the analysis the complex interactions between the different water users of a basin, as well as their relationship with the water resource, which requires applying a transdisciplinary approach, which is why three co-researchers also participate in the project: Dr. Marcela Salgado, sociologist and academic of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences UdeC; Dr. Diego Rivera, expert in basin management from the Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD); and hydrologist Dr. Marcelo Somos-Valenzuela, from the Universidad de La Frontera. It also considers the participation of Pablo Velásquez, a student of the Doctorate in Water Resources at FIAUdeC; and Alejandra Molina, a student of the Doctorate in Social Complexity Sciences at UDD.
Dr. Lillo-Saavedra said that the work, which will run from April 2023 to April 2026, will focus on the Longaví River basin, in the Maule region.It is a very representative basin, it has agricultural, agro-industrial, forestry industry, a lot of territorial segmentation, medium, small and large farmers, and it also has a reservoir that works as a water accumulator," he described. In addition, there is already an advanced path in data capture, since the researcher previously executed a Fondef project, called "H2Org, a tool for the management and planning of irrigation water.”
Socio-hydrological model
“We are trying to see how to characterize current and future water conflicts spatially and temporally, from the perspective of water availability for different user profiles. There are several ways to do this; the simplest is to think about how much water comes in and how much is consumed, an exercise that involves having an estimate of how much water is available, for example, in six months, or next year or the next seven days, depending on the scale of analysis; but in a context of global change, this estimate is not so simple because it has a lot of uncertainty, given the climatic conditions we face. And, on the other hand, demand is not so easy to characterize, because it involves knowing what crop patterns exist, what types of users are consuming and how much they consume, and that is not trivial. So, estimates are currently made with data and analysis tools that are not sufficient to achieve this goal,” contextualized. "On the other hand," he continued, "there are techniques that propose integrated water management in the basin."
He explained that this project “This is the next step, which is to generate a socio-hydrological model that addresses both the technical and social aspects, and is integrated into a conceptual framework for management, which our project brings to fruition with a computational model that uses the agent-based modeling technique, and each agent is a participant in this socio-hydrological system.”
He stressed that “The first challenge is how we characterize each of these agents that are being represented in the basin, and then, the model has to be able to make these agents interact and try to see, for example, what interests they have in relation to each other, and we have to raise all these profiles to make them interact, and what this model that we are proposing does is simulate a dynamic of how the hydro-social system behaves.”
In this regard, Dr. Lillo-Saavedra stated that “To gather all this information, there is anthropological and sociological work behind it, and a robust hydrological study to be able to know what the conditions are that will prevail, and from this computational modeling, to see what the hot spots are where conflicts begin to occur and why. And once we have identified that, decisions can be made.”
