The Influence of a Climate Change Narrative on the Stated Preferences for Long-term Groundwater Management.

The literature identifies cultural values and beliefs as key drivers of climate change risk perception, but evidence is lacking about how media narratives and cultural values influence preferences for adapting to environmental consequences of climate change, including groundwater shortage. We elicited groundwater preferences using a choice experiment survey involving outcomes of the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer. We randomly assigned respondents to an individualistic cultural narrative about climate change to test for framing effects predicted by culturally congruent and incongruent messaging. Results suggest that culturally incongruent messaging (i.e., to non-individualists) emboldens opposition and makes promoted groundwater policies less tractable. This is instructive to policy makers that identifying different stakeholders and avoiding incongruent messages about climate change could improve the effectiveness of collaborative water governance.

Landscape irrigation management for maintaining an aquifer and economic returns.

Expanding irrigated agriculture and dryer climatic conditions has led to large-scale withdrawals of groundwater and the decline in shallow aquifers. Policy makers must wrestle with the challenge of maintaining economic growth while conserving the groundwater resource. A spatially explicit landscape level model analyzes consequences of optimally chosen crop mix patterns on an aquifer and economic returns. The model of the groundwater use incorporates irrigation needs of the crops grown, initial aquifer thickness, hydro-conductivity of the aquifer, and distance to surrounding grid cells. The economic model incorporates the site specific yield, crop mix, and irrigation practice investments to predict economic returns. A tradeoff occurs between the volume of the aquifer and economic returns due to groundwater withdrawal for irrigation, but the farm's ability to grow profitable lower irrigation crops dampens the intensity of this tradeoff. Allowing for multiple unconventional irrigation practices that are yield increasing and water conserving significantly increases the economic returns of a given crop mix while maintaining the aquifer.

The Influence of Groundwater Depletion from Irrigated Agriculture on the Tradeoffs between Ecosystem Services and Economic Returns.

An irrigated agricultural landscape experiencing groundwater overdraft generates economic returns and a suite of ecosystem services (in particular, groundwater supply, greenhouse gases reduction, and surface water quality). Alternative land cover choices indicate tradeoffs among the value of ecosystem services created and the economic returns. These tradeoffs are explored using efficiency frontiers that determine the least value in ecosystem services that must be given up to generate additional economic returns. Agricultural producers may switch to irrigation with surface water using on-farm reservoirs and tail water recovery systems in response to groundwater overdraft, and this has consequences for the bundle of ecosystem service values and economic returns achievable from the landscape. Planning that accounts for both ecosystem service value and economic returns can achieve more value for society, as does the adoption of reservoirs though lowering the costs of irrigation, increasing groundwater levels, and reducing fuel combustion and associated GHG emissions from groundwater pumping. Sensitivity analyses of per unit value of ecosystem services, crop prices, and the groundwater and water purification model parameters indicate tradeoff among ecosystems service values, such as the use of a high-end social cost of carbon ultimately lowers groundwater supply and water purification value by more than 15%.