Abstract:
Large scale urbanization has resulted in greater withdrawals of shared waters and this withdrawal has
been largely dependent on the hegemony of the riparian’s. The last few decades has seen the upward
surge of many countries in terms of development as well as hegemony. Existing structures of established
water sharing framework typically evaluate only parameters related to historic water use such as historic
water demand and supply, contribution to flow, and hydrology. Water conflicts and cooperation is
affected by various issues related with development and hegemony. Characterization and quantification
of development and hegemony parameters is a very complex process. This paper establishes a novel
approach to predict river basins at risk; the approach addresses the issue of water conflict and cooperation
within a methodologically more rigorous predictive framework. Fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique
is used in this paper to undertake the risk assessment of international transboundary rivers. In
this paper the fuzzy domain of risk consists of two fuzzy sets – hegemony and development, indices of
which are developed with the help of fuzzy synthetic evaluation techniques. Then the compositional
rule-base is framed to ascertain the fuzzy risk. This fuzzy risk can be further used to prioritize all the
international river basins which can help in the identification of potentially high risk basins. Risk identification
of international river basins is not only scientifically valuable, but also practically highly useful.
Identifying those basins that are likely to be particularly prone to conflict or cooperation is of high interest
to policy makers.
