Narrative :

Continental and marine river basin systems entail a compound of socioecological processes that interact and affect each other. Several frameworks recognize that anthropogenic activities are embedded within social and ecological systems, which influence and in turn are influenced by the former. The concept of Ecosystem Services (ES) integrates these interrelations so that proper causal channels may be identified amongst a rich set of features that characterize both socioeconomic and ecological production systems. In this way, policymaker and stakeholder decisions may properly account for the implied tradeoffs involved in the allocation of resources in such systems.

Particularly, there is a salient need for comprehensive economic evaluation frameworks in the context of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), which can accommodate the complex economic environment in which stakeholders operate. At present, several methodological approaches use system dynamics as an underlying approach for modeling human decision processes which affect natural systems and lead to several environmental outcomes, which may in turn, affect future human decisions and behavior. This developing field of research has been termed Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) and focuses on various complexities such as heterogeneity, nonlinearity, feedback, and emergence that arise as a natural outcome in these systems (Liu et al., 2007). However, the latter can largely benefit from integrating the former so that empirically validated causal and quasi-causal relationships between the different ES can be embedded into the behavioral models that are coded into CHANS models.

Within this framework, Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) has become an essential tool by providing a sophisticated framework for understanding the complex interactions between human behaviors, ecological processes, and environmental outcomes. As ecosystems are intricately linked to the well-being of human societies, accurately valuing ES—such as clean water, carbon sequestration, pollination, and biodiversity—is critical for sustainable management and policy-making. Traditional valuation methods often struggle to capture the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of ecosystems and the diverse motivations driving human actions. ABMs, however, excel in this area by simulating the decision-making processes of individual agents within a given landscape. This allows for a more holistic assessment on how these decisions collectively impact the provision, distribution, and sustainability of ES.

The main aim of the project is to expand and enhance the NESEV framework to develop and validate a general purpose, dynamic, spatially explicit CHANS-ABM tool that represents complex interactions within ES in the context of IWRM by incorporating human and ecosystemic agent representation, stochastic network analysis, and scenario simulations. Thus, we envisage a flexible tool for understanding how underlying changes in network structures, agent behaviors, and environmental conditions affect overall IWRM system outcomes, tested and validated using a real-world case studies.