Integrated River Basin Modeling Framework to Support Payments for Watershed Services

Abstract

This report is a review of hydrological and water allocation models and an evaluation of their ability to support PES-analysis (payment for environmental services) in Malaprabha River Basin, India. Important aspects that were considered during the evaluation were; (1) the models’ ability to use of remotely sensed land-use and land cover information; (2) ability to use spatially distributed hydro-meteorological data; (3) reasonably comprehensive representation of surface and sub-surface interaction; (4) the user-friendliness to set up and implement the model, and (5) it should not be too demanding in terms of input data. In addition, the model should be affordable for similar implementations in developing country context or available as a public domain package. From the model inventory, there is no single model that can alone carry out the analysis. Based on this fact, a multi-tier modeling approach is recommended. It is proposed to use SWAT and SLURP as the hydrological models in the first tier, and MIKE BASIN and WEAP as the water allocation (water accounting) models in the second tier when implementing the PES-concept in Malaprabha River Basin.