An actionable hydroeconomic Decision Support System for the assessment of water reallocations in irrigated agriculture. A study of minimum environmental flows in the Douro River Basin, Spain.

Despite major recent advances in socio-hydrology and hydroeconomics research, interdisciplinary methods and models for water policy assessment remain largely concealed to the academic arena. Most river basin authorities still base decision-making on inputs from hydrologic Decision Support Systems (DSS), and have limited information on the economic costs that water policies may impose on the economy. This paper presents a time-variant hierarchical framework that connects a hydrologic module and an economic module by means of two-way feedback protocols.