Last week, the Water Institute announced the results of their 2021 seed grant competition. Professor Andrea Brookfield from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science is leading one of the projects, which aims to develop a framework to make decisions about groundwater extraction in agricultural settings.
Supporting decisions about groundwater extraction for irrigation with modern economic risk assessments
Andrea Brookfield (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences), Margaret Insley (Department of Economics), Chengguo Weng (Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science)
The team will explore the application of risk management strategies developed in the finance literature, in particular the use of conditional value at risk (CVAR), to decisions about groundwater extraction for agriculture. More specifically, the seed grant will be used to develop a decision-making framework using CVAR to characterize the risk-return tradeoff of groundwater extraction in an agricultural context. The team will develop this framework focusing on two case studies: 1) irrigation in the severely depleted High Plains Aquifer in Kansas; and 2) expanding irrigation in the Saskatchewan River watershed in the Canadian Prairies.
This project is one of two projects funded though the Water Intitute seed grant competition this year.
Congratulations!
About the Water Institute Seed Grant Program
The Water Institute’s seed grant program was initiated in 2014 to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, international partnerships, and to encourage the development of research proposals that tackle increasingly complex global water issues.
The Water Institute Seed Grant Program aims to catalyze collaboration, facilitate interaction with national or international authorities, to encourage new areas of research and to encourage the development of innovative research proposals