Suchergebnisse

Management of transboundary rivers will be one of the great political and environmental challenges of the 21st century if knowledge of conflict and cooperation is not fully developed. Transboundary river conflict and cooperation are critical for the sustainable development of river basins, regional security, and stability, and have significant scientific and practical implications. The construction of a dataset of transboundary water events – individual conflictive or cooperative interaction between riparian –provides important data support and factual basis for the study of transboundary rivers. However, the most representative research, the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, is built by means of manual reading for information extraction, thus difficult for fast updating, also does not cover the global changes in the past decade. This research aims to build a methodological framework for news media datasets tracking of conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers, provide mass of relevant data for the research of transboundary rivers in the globe, prepare a potent research toolkit, lay a solid foundation for further data mining research, and better suit the big data age. In order to test the effectiveness of the methodological framework and toolkit for dataset construction, this research analyses the word frequency and themes of the articles in datasets. The results show that the datasets built by this framework can reflect comprehensive themes of transboundary water conflict and cooperation. Through the analysis of media activity in different river basins, it is possible to get a global overview of the participation of countries located within and outside of the basin in transboundary water issues.

The management of transboundary rivers will be one of the great political and environmental challenges of the 21st century if knowledge of conflict and cooperation is not fully developed. Transboundary river conflict and cooperation are critical for the sustainable development of river basins, regional security, and stability and have significant scientific and practical implications. The construction of a dataset of transboundary water events – individual conflictive or cooperative interaction between riparian regions – provides an important data support and a factual basis for the study of transboundary rivers. However, the most representative research, the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, is built by means of manual reading for information extraction, is, thus, difficult for fast updating, and also does not cover the global changes in the past decade. This research aims to build a methodological framework for news media datasets to track conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers, provide a mass of relevant data for the research of transboundary rivers on the globe, prepare a potent research toolkit, lay a solid foundation for further data mining research, and better suit the big data age. In order to test the effectiveness of the methodological framework and toolkit for dataset construction, this research analyses the spatial coverage, both in terms of continental and national, temporal coverage from 1953 to 2019, and content coverage and conducts relevance screening of the articles in the four representative river basins in the datasets. The results show that the datasets built by this framework can capture comprehensive content of transboundary water conflict and cooperation in both spatial and temporal coverage with acceptable data quality.

The transboundary Lancang–Mekong River basin has experienced dynamics of cooperation over the past several decades, which is a common emergent response in transboundary coupled human–water systems. Downstream countries rely on the Mekong River for fisheries, agriculture, navigation and ecological services, while upstream countries have been constructing dams to generate hydropower. The dam construction and operation in upstream countries have changed the seasonality of streamflow in downstream countries, affecting their economic benefits. More recently, cooperation between upstream and downstream countries has been enhanced throughout the river basin. In this study, we introduce a quantitative socio-hydrological model to simulate hydrological processes, reservoir operations, economic benefits, policy feedbacks and therefore dynamics of cooperation within the Lancang–Mekong River basin. The model reproduces the observed dynamics of cooperation in the basin revealed by sentiment analysis of news articles. Hydrological variability such as droughts and human activities associated with reservoir operations affect dynamics of cooperation between the riparian countries, with importance attached to indirect political benefits of upstream playing an important role in the enhancement of cooperation. In this way, our study generated understanding of emergent cooperation dynamics in this transboundary river basin, and the socio-hydrological model used here provides a useful new framework to investigate and improve transboundary water management elsewhere.

The transboundary Lancang–Mekong River basin has experienced dynamics of cooperation over the past several decades, which is a common emergent response in transboundary coupled human–water systems. Downstream countries rely on the Mekong River for fisheries, agriculture, navigation and ecological services, while upstream countries have been constructing dams to generate hydropower. The dam construction and operation in upstream countries have changed the seasonality of streamflow in downstream countries, affecting their economic benefits. More recently, cooperation between upstream and downstream countries has been enhanced throughout the river basin. In this study, we introduce a quantitative socio-hydrological model to simulate hydrological processes, reservoir operations, economic benefits, policy feedbacks and therefore dynamics of cooperation within the Lancang–Mekong River basin. The model reproduces the observed dynamics of cooperation in the basin revealed by sentiment analysis of news articles. Hydrological variability such as droughts and human activities associated with reservoir operations affect dynamics of cooperation between the riparian countries, with importance attached to indirect political benefits of upstream playing an important role in the enhancement of cooperation. In this way, our study generated understanding of emergent cooperation dynamics in this transboundary river basin, and the socio-hydrological model used here provides a useful new framework to investigate and improve transboundary water management elsewhere.

The transboundary Lancang-Mekong River Basin has experienced dynamics of cooperation over the past several decades, which is a common emergent response in transboundary human-water systems. Downstream countries rely on Mekong River for fisheries, agriculture, etc., while upstream countries have been constructing dams to generate hydropower. The dam construction and operation in upstream countries have changed the seasonality of streamflow in downstream countries, affecting their economic benefits. More recently, cooperation between upstream and downstream countries has been enhanced throughout the river basin. In this study, we introduce a quantitative socio-hydrological model to simulate hydrological processes, reservoir operations, economic benefits, policy feedbacks and therefore dynamics of cooperation within the Lancang-Mekong River basin. The model reproduces the observed dynamics of cooperation in the basin revealed by sentiment analysis of news articles. Hydrological variability such as droughts and human activities associated with reservoir operations affect dynamics of cooperation between the riparian countries, with importance attached to indirect political benefits of upstream playing an important role in the enhancement of cooperation. In this way, our study generated understanding of emergent cooperation dynamics in this transboundary river basin, and the socio-hydrological model used here provides a useful new framework to investigate and improve transboundary water management elsewhere.