Risk assessment for transboundary rivers using fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique

•This paper highlights the risk assessment of transboundary river basins.•Fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique has been used for the first time for risk assessment in transboundary rivers.•Hegemony and development parameters have been coupled together for the first time to study the risk.•This methodology can be used to develop new basins at risk scale.•This will help to identify basins under high risk and facilitate decision making.

SummaryLarge scale urbanization has resulted in greater withdrawals of shared waters and this withdrawal has been largely dependent on the hegemony of the riparian's. The last few decades has seen the upward surge of many countries in terms of development as well as hegemony. Existing structures of established water sharing framework typically evaluate only parameters related to historic water use such as historic water demand and supply, contribution to flow, and hydrology. Water conflicts and cooperation is affected by various issues related with development and hegemony. Characterization and quantification of development and hegemony parameters is a very complex process. This paper establishes a novel approach to predict river basins at risk; the approach addresses the issue of water conflict and cooperation within a methodologically more rigorous predictive framework. Fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique is used in this paper to undertake the risk assessment of international transboundary rivers. In this paper the fuzzy domain of risk consists of two fuzzy sets - hegemony and development, indices of which are developed with the help of fuzzy synthetic evaluation techniques. Then the compositional rule-base is framed to ascertain the fuzzy risk. This fuzzy risk can be further used to prioritize all the international river basins which can help in the identification of potentially high risk basins. Risk identification of international river basins is not only scientifically valuable, but also practically highly useful. Identifying those basins that are likely to be particularly prone to conflict or cooperation is of high interest to policy makers.