Sustain-COAST Deliverable 3.3b: Report on cost efficiency and cost-benefits of selected preventive scenarios

Bayesian decision analysis is usually employed to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. A common cost-benefit analysis approach, which is novel in the risk analysis of hydrologic/hydraulic applications, and a Bayesian decision analysis are applied to aid the decision making of implementing mitigation measures for groundwater resources management. The alternative option examined is a variation in terms of groundwater use only and possible over-pumping violations. The methodological steps are analytically presented and are associated with the original developed code. The results indicate that the probability of the uncertainty is the driving variable that determines the optimal decision, and depending on the unknown probability handling, the methodology may lead to a different optimal decision. Thus, the proposed tool can help the decision makers to examine and compare different scenarios using different approaches before making a decision considering the cost of a hydrologic/hydraulic project and the varied economic charges that water table limit violations can cause inside an audit interval. In contrast to practices that assess the effect of each proposed action separately considering only current knowledge of the examined issue. This tool aids decision making by considering prior information and the sampling distribution of future successful audits.