The Drought Management Plans (DMPs) are regulatory instruments that establish priorities among the
different water uses and define more stringent constraints to access to publicly provided water during
droughts, especially for non-priority uses such as agriculture. These plans have recently become
widespread across EU southern basins. However, in some of these basins the plans were approved
without an assessment of the potential impacts that they may have on the economic activities exposed
to water restrictions. This paper develops a stochastic methodology to estimate the expected water
availability in agriculture that results from the decision rules of the recently approved DMPs. The
methodology is applied to the particular case of the Guadalquivir River Basin in southern Spain. Results
show that if DMPs are successfully enforced, available water will satisfy in average 62.2% of current
demand, and this figure may drop to 50.2% by the end of the century as a result of climate change. This is
much below the minimum threshold of 90% that has been guaranteed to irrigators