IWRA Proceedings

The regional-economic model RIWU describes the development of economy, demography and industrial water use in the Upper Danube catchment area at the smallest possible spatial dissolution. It is part of an interdisciplinary research project with the title: “GLOVA-Danube – integrative techniques, scenarios and strategies regarding global changes of the water cycle”, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The overall goal of this projects is to develop and validate integration techniques, integrated models, and integrated monitoring procedures for the functional type of a catchment in mountain forelands of the mumid latitudes and to implement them in a network-based Decision-Support-System which will be regionally transferable and thus applicable for a wide range of catchments.

The natural reource “water” can be introduced into economic models by two ways: On the one hand, as input to production processes, water is a limiting factor for regional economic development. On the other hand water use is positively correlated with economic activity and negatively correlated with water prices. As a consequence, there will be interactions between regional economic development, water extraction, water scarcity and water prices. The regional-economic model RIWU currently consists of eigh model equations with vhich seven endonenous variabels are forecast. The calculated industrial water demand and industrial water extraction are depending both on the costs of water extraction and on industrial value added which is again positively correlated with regional exports and negatively correlated with the price of land.