About Us - Watertheft

Watertheft is an ERC funded project which aims to break new ground by developing a novel and interdisciplinary approach to forecast adaptation surprises in complex human-water systems. Methods are empirically applied and tested in 3 living labs experiencing water theft, in Spain, Australia, and the US.

Water theft is an existential threat

Small events can have disproportionate consequences

Why is this important?

Approximately 30% of freshwater ecosystems and 87% of wetlands have disappeared globally due to water overuse, while water-stressed regions have seen their annual GDP growth rates decline by as much as 2.5% due to shortages. Growing competition for the resource is driving higher water theft, which already claims between 30% and 50% of the global water supply—particularly from agricultural uses.

If current water theft trends continue, global water demand could exceed supply by as much as 40% by 2030, thus further depleting water bodies and decreasing GDP growth rates in water-stressed regions by up to 6%.

Why dedicated policies have so fare backfired?

Yet, despite technological advances, policy approaches to tackle water theft have not only remained ineffective, but also often backfired. Amnesties have spurred further theft, the closure of illegal abstractions has led to unregulated water trading, theft sanctions have been consistently offset by the growing value of water due to increasing scarcity, aggravating non-compliance.

At the core of all these ineffective policies lies a fundamental failure to understand the nonlinear adaptive responses by economic agents like irrigators. These responses can affect and be affected by other socioeconomic and ecological processes via feedback loops with cascading impacts that are difficult to foresee.

How to solve the issue? Forecast non linearities in water theft

Here we aim to break new ground by developing a novel and interdisciplinary approach to forecast adaptation surprises in complex human-water systems. To this end, we will integrate data and methods from hydrology, economics, and ensemble techniques to:

forecast the nonlinear adaptive responses of individual agents over time
forecast nonlinear spatial trends emerging from human interactions at the local to global level;
forecast nonlinear socio-hydrological phenomena emerging across complex human-water systems; and
quantify scenario and modeling uncertainties to forecast nonlinearities that may emerge or be amplified due to issues of model parameterization/structure or scenario design.

Innovations to break the status quo

These innovations will allow us to forecast the emergence of nonlinearities and track their impact across coupled human-water systems, thus discovering adaptation surprises and their drivers.

Our methods will be empirically applied and tested in 3 living laboratories experiencing significant water theft:

The Arenales Aquifer in Spain, where the transition from rainfed cereals and vines to water intensive maize and horticulture crops has been partly supplied with illegal water resources that are causing aquifer depletion and nitrate pollution
The Salton Sea in California, where irrigation modernization is driving the cannibalization of return flows by agriculture and depleting lake levels, with significant implications for the environment and human health, i.e. pollutants accumulated in the lake bed.
The Naomi Catchment in central Australia, where water bought by public institutions to restore environmental flows is being pumped out for cotton growing

Our Team

We have formed an interdisciplinary team of economists, hydrologists, and data scientists, and have started working intensively on our case studies in Spain, Australia and the US.