Pilot Study on the Allocation of Initial Water Rights——A Case Study for the Middle Reaches of Heihe River Basin

Abstract

As the water scarcity increasing,tradable water rights mechanism has been a new direction of water management in the world.The initial water rights allocation was critical for water market, which has also been proved in recent research on water markets.That ecological and environmental water demand should be prior to be satisfied or graranteed has been realized and accepted widely,especially for the inland river basin in arid regions.At the same time,equity and efficiency are other two basic goals and principles for initial water rights allocation.As initial water rights allocation is a reallocation of utilization situation in existence,various attitudes should be considered as much as possible.We carried out some questionnaire surveys to users in the basin.Based on the users' survey results,12 experts from 5 study fields made further judgments to combine the attitudes of both the users and the experts; we obtain the indexesvalues by AHP analysis. \ \ The pilot study of Zhangye prefecture in Heihe river basin showed that the actual utilization in most counties have exceeded their initial allocation except the Sunan county and Shandan county,which has provided some convictive evidences for tradable ater rights among different counties and the potential ecological compensation for the upstream in the valley.