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Agent Based Simulation of Drought Management
in Practice
Olivier Barreteau
1
, Eric Sauquet
2
, Jeanne Riaux
3
,
Nicolas Gailliard
4
, and Rémi Barbier
5
1
Cemagref, Montpellier, France
olivier.barreteau@cemagref.fr
2
IRSTEA, Lyon, France
eric.sauquet@irstea.fr
3
IRD, Tunisia
jeann.riaux@ird.fr
4
IRSTEA, Montpellier, France
nicolas.gailliard@irstea.fr
5
ENGEES, Strasbourg, France
rbarbier@engees.u-strasbg.fr
Abstract.
Drought management in France is implemented locally. Due to
discrepancies between assessment of drought situation by managing agency on
one hand and water users on the other hand, as well as to uncertainty in
measures and benchmarks, its efficiency is limited. We propose in this paper an
agent based model designed to represent the suitable indicators of drought at the
suitable spatial scale for any category of stakeholders. Initial test of the model
show its suitability to explore sensitivity of efficiency of drought management
setting according to its context: population of water users and their attitudes to
water restriction rules as well as practical details of implementation.
Keywords:
Drought management, rule enforcement, spatial indicators,
exploratory simulation.
1
Introduction
The French water act institutionalizes a drought committee at county level. Such
committee sets the rules characterizing a situation of drought and how to react when
such situations occur. Characterization of a drought situation depends on two different
activities: (i) defining benchmarks usually with thresholds and reference to past
chronicles, and (ii) assessing current water levels to be compared to these thresholds.
These both activities are in practice rather complex, due to several reasons including
limited data sets across time and space and multiplicity of resources. Hence, actual
characterization of a drought situation is controversial due to the salience of the issue
for participants in such committees combined with the multiplicity of possible
benchmarks, all incorporating uncertainty. The consequences of the practice of these
activities as they are framed by the setting from the local decree are still unknown.
Through a consultancy for the French National Agency for Water and Aquatic
Environments (ONEMA), we first made explicit these controversies [1], the origin of
