Optimizing the economic cost of sustainable pumping in the Southern High Plains aquifer
Chilaka, Chibuzo ， Rinehart, Alex J. ， Wang, Haoying ， Ward, Frank A.
2025-12-01 JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGY 2025 662(卷), null(期), (null页)
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Groundwater depletion poses a threat to long-term agricultural and urban sustainability in arid regions. This paper develops an integrated hydroeconomic optimization model to identify cost-effective policy solutions for sustaining the High Plains Ogallala Aquifer in five counties of eastern New Mexico, USA. The model evaluates four policy strategies-cap-and-trade, proportional shortage sharing, agricultural use priority, and urban use priority-by simulating economic behavior under historical and alternative management regimes from 2014 to 2021. Our results show that a cap-and-trade policy preserves over 89 % of baseline water value while achieving partial aquifer recovery, offering a compelling combination of economic efficiency and resource sustainability. Unlike previous studies, this work links economic performance estimation, institutional structures, and dynamic aquifer response in a unified optimization framework. These findings demonstrate how carefully designed market-based instruments can reconcile economic objectives with environmental protection, offering a transferable modeling approach for groundwater governance worldwide.
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