Hydro-economic modelling in an uncertain world: Integrating costs and benefits of water quality management

Decision support tools that aim to assist efficient integrated water resources management should integrate the multiple, interdependent uses of water. There exist, however, few models that assess the trade-offs between environmental and socio-economic impacts of water management changes in an integrated framework. This paper presents a model that integrates hydrological, ecological and economic information in a Bayesian Network modelling framework. A suite of modeling tools was developed to assess the biophysical and economic impacts of catchment management scenarios, for a case study in Tasmania, Australia. We describe how the models are integrated in a Bayesian Network that shows the economic and ecological trade-offs of different catchment management options. The integrated Bayesian Network model demonstrates a flexible approach to incorporate different types of data and explicitly accounts for accumulated uncertainty in information.