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Abstract

National-scale efforts have been implemented to ensure the water supply to various stakeholders (e.g., livings, agriculture, industry, and environment) under extreme droughts. In South Korea, water supply adjustment standards were established in 2015 to manage water resources stored in each multi-purpose dam. However, the existing management approaches, standards and strategies in South Korea need to be innovated mainly due to unprecedented drought events during the recent decade, such as extreme multi-year droughts in Chungcheongnam-do from 2015 to 2019, and a serious drought in the Yeongseom region in 2022. In this context, we aims to provide a compass to enable agile water management in the Yeongseom region as a case study, by employing SVM which integrates system dynamics and complex relationships among various stakeholders, water suppliers, and decision-makers in water sectors. To this end, we take the initiative to organize Water Policy Council in the Yeongseom region, quantify the relationships of the Council’s participants in mathematical manners, and incorporate their opinions to set representative scenarios for distributing the water under severe droughts, which result in our SVM to be more realistic and reliable. Moreover, this study intends to establish a main protocol on how to operate the Council under expected and unexpected future droughts through Virtual Drought Exercises by using SVM. Our results are expected not only to enhance the drought response capacity of the Yeonseom region by allowing quick preparation for emergency plans and also to minimize social conflicts among stakeholders under a given water shortage circumstance.