Risk Assessment for Ecological Planning of Arid Inland River Basins Under Hydrological and Management Uncertainties

The Shiyanghe river basin, an arid inland basin of northwest China, is taken as an example to analyze the risk for achieving the ecological planning objective in arid inland river basins under uncertainty conditions. Hydrology and management uncertainties that affect the accomplishment of ecological planning objective are analyzed quantitatively with the methods of Bayesian theory based Probabilistic model, scenario analysis and interval analysis. Bayesian probabilistic analysis method was used to analyze the hydrological uncertainties in the form of probability and interval distributions in planning period, while the scenario analysis method and interval method were used to analyze the managing uncertainties in the form of interval numbers. Instead of the ecological risk analysis, which for arid inland river basin, of studying the impact of environmental and human factor on ecological system, water resources and environment, we focused on analysing the possible impact of hydrological and management uncertainty factor on the ecological planning, and forecasting the degree of the completion under the uncertainty. Our study provided the probabilities of achieving ecological planning objective and the possible deviation of different scenarios. The more local water resources and higher level of local water resource utilization and management appeared to lead higher probability to achieve the ecological objective. This study can help environment and water resource managers and planner to formulate a rational planning for arid inland river basins under hydrological and management uncertainty.