Presentation by Mr.Schmidt, IEWP Secretariat, during the "Technical Exchange on River Basin Management Planing" workshop

1. Technical Exchange on River
Basin Management Planning
13-14 February 2017, Hyderabad

2. Technical Exchange on River
Basin Management Planning
13-14 February 2017, Hyderabad

3. Impulse contribution:
Guido Schmidt. India-EU Water Partnership Secretariat. At Technical Exchange Development of Integrated
Water Resources Management Plans in India. 14 February 2017. Hyderabad
Potential and possible power of benefit
sharing and trade-offs to address conflictive
issues on the basin-wide scale

4. Benefit-sharing
Countries/regions through which a river flows can share the
financial, social, and environmental benefits, without
necessarily dividing the flow of water or allocating diversions
among the countries in a quantitative manner
benefit sharing reframes the means of ‘possessing’ water, by
privileging the benefits of joint rather than unilateral
development of the shared resource… Benefit sharing focuses on
how the outputs from water use can be optimally allocated to
various actors for different objectives.
Trade-offs: International treaty deliberations use the terms rights,
interests, and needs. Analysis and Negotiations needed to
identify and precise trade-offs

5. International treaty deliberations use the terms rights, interests,
and needs
Analysis and Negotiations needed to identify and precise trade-
offs
Trade-offs

6. Types of Benefits to
be shared
• Energy (by sharing production)
• Permanent Water quantity (by sharing investments in supply
or efficiency infrastructure)
• Temporary Water scarcity and Drought risk (by water markets
or trading schema)
• Flood risks (by upstream investments)
• Water quality improvements (by upstream investments)

7. Experiences of
benefit-sharing (1)
Energy
• Senegal: Manantali dam (2003) re investments, navigation, hydropower
• India-Bhutan hydropower investments & cooperation
• Mekong: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam
• Itaipu dam (Brazil, Paraguay) effect of royalties on living conditions
• Lesotho Highlands Water Project on the River Senqu-Orange (Angola,
Namibia): locating the project upstream increases aggregate net benefits .
Lesotho Highlands Water Project illustrates benefit sharing in practice
through payment for water, purchase agreements for power, and
financing arrangements
• Dams on the Columbia River (US-Canada): altered dam design increases
aggregate net benefits , including flood protection benefits
• Kariba Dam on the River Zambezi (Zambia, Zimbabwe)
• IIT Roorkee has explored a framework to promote cooperation in the
Brahmaputra basin (hydropower, flood management, navigation)

8. Experiences of
benefit-sharing (2)
Preventing flood risks by upstream investments
• Room for the River NL-BE (green infrastructure)
• Linked to Hydropower (e.g. Columbia river)
Water scarcity and Drought risk
• Drought Management Plans, with different guarantee levels,
e.g. Spain, EU
• Water markets (potentially a tool for sharing benefits),
Australia
• Agreement on environmental flows regimes

9. Challenges
1. equitable sharing of value, especially with women and the less-wealthy,
2. potentially high costs of development and implementation,
3. changing historical water institutions/ traditions, and
4. overcoming perceptions of increased economic or security risk
Criteria and institutional set-up :
• economic (optimization)
• environmental
• Long-term sustainability
• Social (equity) …
Tools:
• Multi-criteria analysis
• Hydro-economic modelling
• Gaming & scenario development