Market-Based Allocation Mechanisms for Agricultural Water Rights in Arid Regions: A Pilot Study in Karamay

To address water resource constraints in extreme arid regions, Karamay District, as a national pilot for deepening agricultural water rights reform, has undertaken a systematic exploration of water rights trading practices. This study uses Karamay District in Xinjiang as a case to systematically deconstruct the market-based allocation mechanism for agricultural water rights in arid areas. It elucidates the district's “administrative leadership with irrigation district coordination” model, which combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to complete the initial allocation of agricultural water rights and their registration to individual households. The study constructs a “volume-period-price” transaction framework based on water rights certificates, facilitates multiple water rights trading models, and enhances transaction efficiency through an information platform. Practice demonstrates that water rights trading effectively incentivizes water conservation: agricultural water consumption decreased by 20.7% from 96.8646 million m3 in 2022 to 76.7705 million m3 in 2024, while the effective utilization coefficient of farmland irrigation water rose from 0.647 (2017) to 0.691 (2024), exceeding the regional average of 0.575. As of May 2025, the district has completed 1 cross-regional transaction (1 million m3), 55 government buyback transactions (2.14 million m3), and 14 farmer-to-farmer transactions (66,000 m3), with a total traded volume of 3.206 million m3. This achieved optimized water resource allocation and enhanced water-saving efficiency, providing a replicable “Karamay Experience” for similar regions.