A Multiobjective Water Allocation Model for Economic Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability: Case Study

TL;DR

This paper develops a multiobjective water allocation model that balances economic benefits and environmental sustainability, improving upon existing models by ensuring feasibility and explicitly considering environmental constraints, with a case study in Bangladesh.

Contribution

It introduces a reformulated hydro-economic model that explicitly incorporates environmental and capacity constraints, enabling balanced trade-offs between economic and ecological objectives.

Findings

The model produces feasible, consistent solutions for water and crop allocation.

It identifies Pareto-optimal trade-offs between economic gains and environmental protection.

Case study demonstrates practical application in water-limited river basins.

Abstract

The management of irrigation water systems has become increasingly complex due to competing demands for agricultural production, groundwater sustainability, and environmental flow requirements, particularly under hydrologic variability and climate uncertainty. Addressing these challenges requires optimization frameworks that can jointly determine optimal crop allocation, groundwater pumping, and environmental flow releases while maintaining economic and hydrological feasibility. However, existing hydro-economic models, including the widely used Lewis and Randall formulation, may overestimate net benefits by allowing infeasible negative pumping and surface water allocations. We extend the Lewis and Randall framework by reformulating groundwater pumping and surface water use as non-negative, demand-driven decision variables and by explicitly incorporating environmental flow and canal capacity constraints. Three models are developed to maximize economic benefit, minimize environmental deficits, and a multiobjective model that evaluates the trade-offs between these two objectives. An illustrative test case examining optimal crop area allocation and environmental flow management across dry, average, and wet years, using data from the Rajshahi Barind Tract in northwestern Bangladesh, is presented. The results show that the proposed formulation produces economically and hydrologically consistent solutions, identifying optimal strategies when either net benefits or environmental protection is prioritized, as well as Pareto-optimal trade-offs when both objectives are considered together. These findings provide practical insights for balancing farm income, groundwater sustainability, and ecological protection, offering a robust decision-support tool for irrigation management in water-limited river basins.