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Transboundary cooperation in infrastructure operation generates economic and environmental co-benefits in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin

Nature Water volume 2, pages 589–601 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Lancang-Mekong River Basin is facing booming water resources infrastructure development, long-term transboundary conflicts and trade-offs between economic goals and ecosystem services provision. Optimizing the pathway towards sustainable infrastructure operation has lacked multisector-coordinated and decision behaviour-based perspectives for transboundary water systems. In this study we quantified how, and to what extent, transboundary cooperation generates economic and environmental co-benefits by jointly using a coupled simulation–optimization approach and cooperative game theoretical analysis. We found that full cooperation outweighs partial or non-cooperation modes to promote economic benefits by 3 to 21% and to minimize the losses in fishery and sediment transport from 23% and 60% to 12% and 22%, respectively. Full cooperation becomes more beneficial and stable alongside infrastructure expansion, climate change and satisfying the hydrological needs of river ecosystems. These findings underscore the importance of full cooperation for sustaining socio-environmental systems and highlight the need for a benefit reallocation mechanism and designed flow management to stabilize basin-level full cooperation in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin.

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Fig. 1: Map of the LMRB.
Fig. 2: Economic benefits and environmental impacts in the LMRB under different scenarios.
Fig. 3: Nonlinear response of economic benefits to different environmental impacts.
Fig. 4: Negotiation space and incremental benefit allocation among riparian countries in the LMRB.

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Data availability

All of the data needed to replicate our results are available in the article, online or in the Supplementary Information.

Code availability

All of the codes used in this study can be provided by the corresponding authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 92047302, U2243215, 42225102 and 42361144876).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Yang Yu, Jinyu Gao, Shiruo Hu, Bo Liu & Jianshi Zhao

  2. Rural Revitalization Finance Department, China Construction Bank, Beijing, China

    Yang Yu

  3. Sino-France Institute of Earth Systems Science, Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yan Bo

  4. Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Andrea Castelletti

  5. Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Andrea Castelletti

  6. Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement, Nogent sur Marne, France

    Patrice Dumas

  7. Centralized Control Center, Yalong River Hydropower Development Company, Chengdu, China

    Jinyu Gao

  8. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Ximing Cai

  9. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Junguo Liu

  10. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Taher Kahil & Yoshihide Wada

  11. National Key Laboratory of Water Disaster Prevention, Jiangsu Province Engineering Research Center of Watershed Geospatial Intelligence, College of Geography and Remote Sensing, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Feng Zhou

  12. Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Feng Zhou

  13. Southwest United Graduate School, Kunming, China

    Feng Zhou

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Contributions

J.Z. and F.Z. designed the study. Y.Y., Y.B. and J.G. performed the computational analyses. F.Z., J.Z., Y.Y., A.C. and S.H. drafted the paper. Y.Y., Y.B., B.L., S.H. and J.G. collected the data and prepared figures and tables. P.D., X.C., J.L., T.K. and Y.W. reviewed and commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Feng Zhou or Jianshi Zhao.

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Supplementary Methods, Tables 1–12 and Figs. 1–6.

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Yu, Y., Bo, Y., Castelletti, A. et al. Transboundary cooperation in infrastructure operation generates economic and environmental co-benefits in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin. Nat Water 2, 589–601 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00246-1

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