The article “Balancing equity and efficiency in transboundary water systems with Atkinson’s welfare function”, written by Wyatt Arnold, Matteo Giuliani and Andrea Castelletti from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano, has been published in Nature Water.
The study proposes a new method to optimise the management of transboundary water resources, considering not only the overall efficiency of the systems, but also equity in the distribution of benefits among the different stakeholders involved.
The framework developed integrates Atkinson’s welfare function, a tool that makes it possible to explicitly define the degree of attention given to distributive justice in relation to the maximisation of efficiency. Applied to the Zambezi River basin, with particular reference to hydropower production management and the integration of floating photovoltaics, the method shows that it is possible to significantly improve system equity with very limited losses in total hydropower production.
One of the main advantages of this approach is its ability to support the most vulnerable actors and strengthen drought resilience, without the need to define weights or hierarchies among the different stakeholders in advance.