Water Resources and Economics最新文献

Water access is a critical public policy problem that many people face worldwide. As demand for fresh water rises and supply declines, a growing number of regions and localities, including cities, will be compelled to respond to water shortages. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the rationalization of water consumption utilizing demarketing strategies in the Gaza Strip (GS), Palestine. The population under study comprises the residents of the GS, amounting to approximately 2.1 million (2021) individuals. A survey among 372 respondents living and working in the five GS governorates, using a stratified random sample approach to mirror the population distribution, finds a significant relationship between consumer attitudes toward reducing water consumption and 5 key marketing variables (product, price, place, promotion, and people). Furthermore, four moderators reinforced these relationships, i.e., the perceived role of laws and legislations, perceived moral obligation, perceived water right, and institutional sentiment toward the water authority's management of water resources. Additionally, age, education level, marital status, and monthly income influence the effect of the demarketing mix on consumer attitudes toward reducing water consumption. This study informs managerial action and policy-making about the key variables to modulate in order to improve consumers' attitudes toward water rationalization and thus intrinsically motivate consumers to curb water consumption.

The abandonment or closure of wastewater treatment plants is a potential problem in sanitation policies, where municipalities must decide which type of plant should build in their territory. We used an interaction effects model to test the effect of financial self-sufficiency in the operation of Mexican treatment plants in the national sanitation policy periods: the more money policy approach and the more planning policy approach. Our results show that during the more planning policy approach, the wastewater treatment plants' effectiveness increases more than the more money policy approach period, which is more vital in plants with low operating costs. Municipal financial self-sufficiency positively affects wastewater treatment plants' effectiveness more substantially in plants with high operating costs. Policy implications of these findings aim to be careful with the more money policy approach to developing wastewater infrastructure since municipalities require proper planning for the particular conditions of each site. The Mexican case shows how combining municipal financial insufficiency and centralization of planning in the national government, as is common in the countries of the Global South, affects the probability of plant survivorship. Furthermore, the effect of this combination grows when national governments increase their budgets to invest.

Willingness to pay (WTP) has commonly been used as a metric for the valuation of environmental goods and services. Recent studies have also recommended the use of willingness to volunteer (WTV) as a measure for valuation, especially in developing countries with low monetary income and missing (or imperfect) labor markets. The joint households' decision to contribute money and time, however, is often overlooked in these studies. When households are willing to contribute both time and money, using WTP (or WTV) alone can underestimate their preferences for environmental goods and services. This study examines both households’ WTP and WTV for the Danda river restoration in Nepal using survey data of 752 households residing near the river. By jointly estimating WTP and WTV, this study finds robust public support for improving the river in both time and monetary forms, although the proportion of respondents reporting positive WTV is higher. Wealthier households, however, prefer the payment option and are significantly less willing to contribute their time. We also find that households that perceive more direct benefits from an improved Danda river express higher WTP but are not significantly likely to volunteer more time, suggesting that volunteering decisions may not purely be motivated by the benefits households perceive from a clean river.

Increasing concern over cyber-resilience has generated new research questions for policy and practice from both technical and economic viewpoints. In particular, the acknowledged importance of the adaptive behaviour of citizens when confronted with unexpected events requires an improved understanding of preferences for measures that seek to enhance the resilience of critical infrastructure. This paper aims to contribute to this growing body of research by elicitating the preferences of Eurometropolis of Strasbourg (France) inhabitants for greater resilience of their water distribution system to cyber-attacks. It relies on a Discrete Choice Experiment survey. The results of the latent class model show that two classes of respondents exhibit diametrically-opposed preferences. The majority display a high WTP to benefit from a shorter duration of restrictions on water consumption for drinking and cooking and for services for vulnerable people. The remainder, who are younger and less environmentally conscious, do not value the same attributes and, when this happens, their WTP has a negative coefficient. Risk-aversion, knowledge and information are among the variables that help to explain the heterogeneous nature of preferences. Tailored and targeted communication campaigns could therefore prove useful to increase users’ awareness and understanding of the underlying issues and thereby the public commitment to and acceptability of the resilience policies leading to their successful implementation. Our work provides important information for decision-makers and will help in the choice between a public protection policy that improves crisis response and one that promotes ex-ante measures aimed at reducing impacts.

Irrigation plays a critical role in Vietnam’s rural economy and the national food security priority. The Vietnamese government has developed an extensive irrigation system and waived irrigation costs for farmers to reduce rural poverty. However, excessive use of water in agriculture has become a major concern. It is important to evaluate the value of water in order to encourage economical use. We use a multi-model approach and plot-level data to indirectly estimate the value of irrigation water and address a majority of issues related to causal identification. Our results indicate that farmlands with access to irrigation have significantly higher productivity and land values. The high value of irrigation water in agricultural production is a premise for compulsory payment for irrigation water. We then investigate the design of Vietnam’s irrigation policy and the hazards that have arose from the fee waiver policy. Finally, we explain why the current policy has failed to promote a sustainable long-term solution.

This paper studies the relationship between drinking water contamination and treatment costs using a panel data for Norwegian local governments in the period 2003–2021. Because contamination and costs affect each other, we derive and estimate a set of reduced form equations that take the two-way causality into account. Our results indicate that while post-treatment contamination has little if any effect on treatment costs, increased expenditures reduce contamination in the following years.

While ongoing climate change requires effective adaptation strategies, decision-making on the scale, timing and location of adaptation measures remains challenging, as the extent and pace of climate change is uncertain. In particular, uncertainty surrounds the success of mitigation strategies and economic and demographic developments. While ‘grey’ measures, such as dikes and pumping, have been the dominant form of adaptation in the past against inland flooding, Nature-based Solutions are receiving more attention. However, evidence on their cost-effectiveness compared to grey alternatives is still limited. In this article, we develop a real options model that integrates climate change uncertainty as well as flexibility of the timing of investment. We expect that the uncertainty falls over time due to an increase in climate data that becomes available to the decision-maker. The decision-maker learns about climate change from two types of events: inland flooding and meteorological drought. The model is calibrated with data from the Oldambt–Eemskanaal–Dollardboezem water system in the Dutch Province of Groningen. Our results show the potential for Nature-based Solutions to become a viable alternative to dike heightening and pumping in addressing both extreme events. Moreover, we observe that the cost-effectiveness of Nature-based Solutions depends on the maturing time of the ecosystem, the value of land on which the measure is being implemented, and the type of information considered in the investment decision. We show that maturing times of up to nine years make a Nature-based Solution the preferred measure to invest in, even under strong beliefs of severe climate change. When maturing times exceed nine years, the option takes too long to become effective and pumping is preferred. Furthermore, our results show that an increase in the value of land on which a Nature-based Solution is being constructed may substantially reduce its cost-effectiveness. Finally, decision-making flexibility becomes valuable if expected damages from floods and droughts are sufficiently low and the decision-maker learns quickly about climate change.

Freshwater scarcity is worsening as we quickly approach the freshwater planetary boundary. There has been extensive research and policy development in the space of water scarcity, pollution and accessibility, centered around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A large body of literature examines household and climate characteristics predictive of water consumption by households. However, there does not appear to be any research on the role of views of and proximity to water bodies in household water consumption. In this paper, we develop a simple model of water consumption which depends on the perceptions of water scarcity and the perceptions of whether water scarcity is an issue. Using geographic information systems (GIS) viewshed analysis, we model whether properties in Tauranga, New Zealand, have views of lakes and the coast. We then use these variables in an SA1 unit fixed effects model of water consumption. We find that views of lakes are associated with higher water consumption and views of the coast are associated with lower water consumption. We suggest that these associations are driven by psychological biases which alter the perceptions of water scarcity and concern for water scarcity. We deploy a range of robustness checks and argue that our results may be causal, though further research is required to confirm this.

Payments for watershed services (PWS) programs have become a prominent approach to protect or restore ecosystems and watershed services but little is known about where these innovative financing tools and governance systems emerge and persist. In 2008, the Mexican government launched a program where they matched funding from local partners to establish user-financed PWS, leading to the creation of 145 programs between 2008 and 2019. We study the factors related to the emergence and persistence of these local, user-financed PWS programs across Mexico. We assemble a unique database on these programs, as well as biophysical, economic, socio-cultural, and institutional variables, at the municipality level. We use logistic regression to analyze the variables correlated with the emergence and persistence of PWS. We find that PWS programs are more likely to emerge in municipalities with lower opportunity costs of forest conservation; that are wealthier; that have higher institutional capacity; and that have more collective land tenure and protected areas. PWS programs are more likely to persist in municipalities where watershed conditions are a concern; that have more wealth and institutional capacity; and that have a non-governmental organization or water utility involved as the local counterpart. These results suggest that emergence and persistence of local, user-financed PWS programs to address water security can occur when the opportunity costs of conservation are met; the provision of ecosystem services is enhanced; there are sustainable sources of financing; and there is institutional capacity that involves non-state actors.