Soft-cooperation via data sharing eases transboundary conflicts in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin

Water resources management in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB) is challenging in face of the complex trans-national geopolitical context, the acceleration of hydropower dam expansion, and the growing demands for energy, food, and riverine ecosystem preservation across the basin. Centralised management through coordinated operation of all the basin water infrastructures (“hard cooperation”) across the river basin is ideal but hard to achieve given the existing geopolitical context of the region. To overcome these barriers and facilitate a more adaptive and reliable operation of the LMRB's water system, this paper focuses on the concept of “soft-cooperation”, i.e. the idea of indirectly fostering cooperation by sharing data across countries to inform the non-cooperative (or independent) operation of their systems. Here, we first quantify existing riparian conflicts and synergies for the non-cooperative scenario, where upstream and downstream act independently without any form of cooperation, and for the “hard cooperation” configuration, where an ideal centralised operator jointly operates all the infrastructures. Then a “soft cooperation” scheme assuming data sharing across riparian countries is evaluated. The most effective and informative data is selected via machine learning and used to inform the design of the river reservoir system operation via evolutionary multiobjective direct policy search. Results show that the riparian conflicts around water mainly exist between the sectors, i.e. hydropower production vs ecosystem conservation, rather than among countries. For reservoirs with various capacities and locations, the value of information varies. Generally, sharing data about the water currently available in the different river storages results in a large improvement in hydropower production. This study highlights the value of appropriate data sharing and selection in water system operation as an indirect way of promoting cooperation in transboundary river management.