Water supply development and tariffs in Tanzania: From free water policy towards cost recovery

The article describes the historical development of water tariff policy in Tanzania from the colonial times to present. After gaining independence, the country introduced “free” water policy in its rural areas. Criticism against this policy was expressed already in the 1970s, but it was not until the late 1980s that change became unavoidable. All the while urban water tariffs continued to decline in real terms. In rural and periurban areas of Tanzania consumers often have to pay substantial amounts of money for water to resellers and vendors since the public utilities are unable to provide operative service. Besides, only a part of the water bills are actually collected. Now that the free water supply policy has been officially abandoned, the development of water tariffs and the institutions in general are a great challenge for the country.     

Food Supply Chain Governance And Public Health Externalities: Upstream Policy Interventions And The UK State

Contemporary food supply chains are generating externalities with high economic and social costs, notably in public health terms through the rise in diet-related non-communicable disease. The UK State is developing policy strategies to tackle these public health problems alongside intergovernmental responses. However, the governance of food supply chains is conducted by, and across, both private and public spheres and within a multilevel framework. The realities of contemporary food governance are that private interests are key drivers of food supply chains and have institutionalized a great deal of standards-setting and quality, notably from their locations in the downstream and midstream sectors. The UK State is designing some downstream and some midstream interventions to ameliorate the public health impacts of current food consumption patterns in England. The UK State has not addressed upstream interventions towards public health diet at the primary food production and processing stages, although traditionally it has shaped agricultural policy. Within the realities of contemporary multilevel governance, the UK State must act within the contexts set by the international regimes of the Common Agricultural Policy and the World Trade Organization agreements, notably on agriculture. The potential for further upstream agricultural policy reform is considered as part of a wider policy approach to address the public health externalities issuing from contemporary food supply chains within this multilevel governance context.     

A dynamic simulation based water resources education tool

Educational tools to assist the public in recognizing impacts of water policy in a realistic context are not generally available. This project developed systems with modeling-based educational decision support simulation tools to satisfy this need. The goal of this model is to teach undergraduate students and the general public about the implications of common water management alternatives so that they can better understand or become involved in water policy and make more knowledgeable personal or community decisions. The model is based on Powersim, a dynamic simulation software package capable of producing web-accessible, intuitive, graphic, user-friendly interfaces. Modules are included to represent residential, agricultural, industrial, and turf uses, as well as non-market values, water quality, reservoir, flow, and climate conditions. Supplementary materials emphasize important concepts and lead learners through the model, culminating in an open-ended water management project. The model is used in a University of Arizona undergraduate class and within the Arizona Master Watershed Stewards Program. Evaluation results demonstrated improved understanding of concepts and system interactions, fulfilling the project's objectives.     

Contribution of Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluents to Nutrient Dynamics in Aquatic Systems: A Review

Excessive nutrient loading (considering nitrogen and phosphorus) is a major ongoing threat to water quality and here we review the impact of nutrient discharges from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to United States (U.S.) freshwater systems. While urban and agricultural land uses are significant nonpoint nutrient contributors, effluent from point sources such as WWTPs can overwhelm receiving waters, effectively dominating hydrological characteristics and regulating instream nutrient processes. Population growth, increased wastewater volumes, and sustainability of critical water resources have all been key factors influencing the extent of wastewater treatment. Reducing nutrient concentrations in wastewater is an important aspect of water quality management because excessive nutrient concentrations often prevent water bodies from meeting designated uses. WWTPs employ numerous physical, chemical, and biological methods to improve effluent water quality but nutrient removal requires advanced treatment and infrastructure that may be economically prohibitive. Therefore, effluent nutrient concentrations vary depending on the particular processes used to treat influent wastewater. Increasingly stringent regulations regarding nutrient concentrations in discharged effluent, along with greater freshwater demand in populous areas, have led to the development of extensive water recycling programs within many U.S. regions. Reuse programs provide an opportunity to reduce or eliminate direct nutrient discharges to receiving waters while allowing for the beneficial use of reclaimed water. However, nutrients in reclaimed water can still be a concern for reuse applications, such as agricultural and landscape irrigation.     

Analysis of the role of waste minimisation clubs in reducing industrial water demand in the UK

As a result of the UK Government's waste policy, which increasingly encourages sustainable development, and the realisation that water in the UK cannot be treated as an unlimited resource, there is growing interest in reducing the demand for water by industry. A series of industrial waste minimisation clubs have been set up within the country. This paper identifies the effectiveness of these clubs in reducing the demand for water. An overview of some of the clubs show how there is a major discrepancy between potential and implemented water savings, whilst a more detailed analysis of three specific examples show how water demand and cost to the company can be reduced, with the project paying for itself within around 1 year. It appears that companies are able to reduce water consumption by approximately 30%. If this level of saving was taken up by the entire industrial sector in England and Wales, water consumption could be reduced by approximately 1500 Ml/day. This reduction would be more significant in regions of lower rainfall, for example East Anglia and Southeast England.     

Desalinated versus recycled water: public perceptions and profiles of the accepters

Many countries' water resources are limited in both quantity and quality. While engineering solutions can now safely produce recycled and desalinated water from non-potable sources at a relatively low cost, the general public is sceptical about adopting these alternative water sources. Social scientists, policy makers and technical experts need to better understand what is causing this lack of acceptance by the general population and how acceptance levels for recycled and desalinated water can be increased. This study is the first to conduct a comparative analysis of knowledge, perceptions, and acceptability, and determine segments of residents who are more open-minded than the general population toward the use of recycled and desalinated water. The Australian population once perceived desalinated water as environmentally unfriendly, and recycled water as a public health hazard. The general level of knowledge about these two concepts as potential water sources has historically been low. After nearly five years of serious drought, accompanied by severe water restrictions across most of the country, and subsequent media attention on solutions to water scarcity, Australians now show more acceptance of desalinated water for close-to-body uses, and less resistance to recycled water for garden watering and cleaning uses. The types of people likely to be strong accepters of the two alternative water sources are distinctly different groups, and can be reached through different media mixes. This finding has significant implications for policy makers and water practitioners.     

Developing a sustainable energy strategy for a water utility. Part I: A review of the UK legislative framework

Increasing political effort to improve water quality across the UK and Europe has led to water and sewerage companies investing heavily in high-tech wastewater treatment plants capable of producing high quality effluents. Consequently, amounts of bought-in electricity used for wastewater treatment has and will continue to increase significantly over coming years, while greater provision of enhanced sewage treatment also produces greater volumes of sewage sludge requiring treatment and disposal. Over the same period, tougher controls on the quality of biosolids applied to agricultural land have also been introduced, while there has been an international attempt to reduce the use of fossil-fuel derived power sources because of concerns over global warming. The latter has brought about the introduction of financial instruments, such as the Climate Change Levy, to curb energy use, promote energy efficiency and encourage the development of renewable energy technologies. These factors are set to drive-up the costs of providing adequate sewage treatment services, while at the same time, a tough regulatory line taken to control profits on regional monopolies held by the UK water companies will significantly reduce their revenues over the period 2000-05. The result is that, financially, UK water and sewerage companies face their most challenging period since privatisation in 1989. This paper briefly outlines the current regulations relating to water quality and energy use that will affect water company operations over coming years.     

Incorporation of biological information in water quality planning

Progress toward the goal of restoring integrity to the waters in the United States has been difficult to assess. This difficulty may arise from the type of regulatory policy that has been traditionally used. With the advent of widespread wastewater treatment, the use of a planning approach employing receiving water impact standards may offer a more practical and direct means of defining and assessing integrity. Biological community response is shown to offer an integrated approach to implementing and evaluating water quality management policy. The state of Maine (USA) has revised its water quality law by utilizing biological community response to assess integrity. This law is presented as a model that employs impact measures and a planning approach for the implementation of water quality management policy.     

The European Water Framework Directive: Water Quality Classification and Implications to Engineering Planning

The European Water framework directive (WFD) is probably the most important environmental management directive that has been enacted over the last decade in the European Union. The directive aims at achieving an overall good ecological status in all European water bodies. In this article, we discuss the implementation steps of the WFD and their implications for environmental engineering practice while focusing on rivers as the main receiving waters. Arising challenges for engineers and scientists are seen in the quantitative assessment of water quality, where standardized systems are needed to estimate the biological status. This is equally of concern in engineering planning, where the prediction of ecological impacts is required. Studies dealing with both classification and prediction of the ecological water quality are reviewed. Further, the combined emission–water quality approach is discussed. Common understanding of this combined approach is to apply the most stringent of either water quality or emission standard to a certain case. In contrast, for example, the Austrian water act enables the application of only the water quality based approach - at least on a temporary basis.     

The Politics of Participation in Watershed Modeling

While researchers and decision-makers increasingly recognize the importance of public participation in environmental decision-making, there is less agreement about how to involve the public. One of the most controversial issues is how to involve citizens in producing scientific information. Although this question is relevant to many areas of environmental policy, it has come to the fore in watershed management. Increasingly, the public is becoming involved in the sophisticated computer modeling efforts that have been developed to inform watershed management decisions. These models typically have been treated as technical inputs to the policy process. However, model-building itself involves numerous assumptions, judgments, and decisions that are relevant to the public. This paper examines the politics of public involvement in watershed modeling efforts and proposes five guidelines for good practice for such efforts. Using these guidelines, I analyze four cases in which different approaches to public involvement in the modeling process have been attempted and make recommendations for future efforts to involve communities in watershed modeling.     

Engaging with the Ecological Footprint as a Decision-Making Tool: Process and Responses

Since the initial development of the Ecological Footprint in the early 1990s, the concept has gained increased interest amongst academics and practitioners internationally. In the UK, it is estimated that some 60 to 70 Ecological Footprint studies were undertaken between 1999 and 2004. Although the majority of interest in Ecological Footprinting has come from local government, a recent study has found that government officers involved in the formulation of council policy have not been able to engage with the Ecological Footprint as a process or use the results to inform policy decisions. This paper analyses how an Ecological Footprint has been developed for Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. The approach used to construct an Ecological Footprint for Cardiff has been significantly different to that which had been used previously in the UK, as it has involved a unique consortium of researchers at Cardiff University and policy development officers at Cardiff Council checking the quality of data used in the Footprint calculation, and developing a range of policy scenarios.     

The potential role of stated preference methods in the Water Framework Directive to assess disproportionate costs

This paper examines the issue of disproportionate costs of Water Framework Directive (WFD) implementation using public surveys as a means to inform policy and decision making. Public taxpayers are asked their opinion regarding the implementation of the WFD and its costs. Taxpayers are expected to bear a large share of the cost of WFD implementation, be it through national taxation, local water pollution charges or higher market prices for water related goods and services. The paper's main objective is to illustrate the role of stated preference research to elicit public opinions and perceptions towards socially acceptable levels of water quality and public willingness to pay (WTP) for the expected environmental benefits of the WFD. Stated preference research can be used as a way to assess the concept of disproportionate costs to those who are expected to bear a large share of the costs of WFD implementation, and at the same time address the issue of public participation in the WFD. The survey results are used as a public consultation tool to inform policy and decision makers about public willingness and ability to pay for the implementation of the WFD. This measure can be used as one of the benchmarks to define disproportionate costs in a cost-benefit context.     

Enhancing consultation practices on Air Quality Management in local authorities

Schedule 11 of the Environment Act 1995 underpins the requirement for consultation on air quality issues. The ongoing air quality review and assessment process represents one of the largest locally based science policy and communication initiatives ever undertaken in the UK. This paper outlines the practice of consultation and communication for Air Quality Management (AQM) and reviews the interaction between Environmental Health professionals, as the leading actor in the AQM process and other stakeholders involved in air quality consultation, including the public. Results are presented from a widespread questionnaire survey of English local authorities. Data indicate that the majority of air quality consultation has been carried out with statutory consultees (by sending the review and assessment reports) and the public (via websites and leaflets) in the form of information dissemination.     

Public parks as an element of urban planning: a missing piece in Accra's growth and development

Public parks are important to urban environments, residents, and visitors. Among other functions, they provide environmental services, such as air and water purification, and they increase both recreational opportunities and the attractiveness of the urban environment. Because of their importance, urban parks serve as public spaces that provide visitors and urban residents with rights to the city. This paper identifies the dearth of urban public parks in Accra-Tema city-region as worrying. The Accra Plan 1958 underscored the significance of green spaces and designated the coastal strip for parks development but the areas have been lost to various urban uses. We argue that the continual neglect of public parks within urban planning and community development schemes in the Accra-Tema city-region is a major concern because it is depriving the citizens a right to the city and its public spaces. A number of factors have worked adversely against the provision of public parks and green spaces in the city-region. These include development pressures, undue political interference, a complex land delivery system, and ad hoc planning. The paper concludes by offering policy suggestions as to how to resolve the dearth of parks and green spaces in the city-region.     

Using Decision Analysis to Choose Phosphorus Targets for Lake Erie

Lake Erie water quality has improved dramatically since the degraded conditions of the 1960s. Additional gains could be made, but at the expense of further investment and reductions in fishery productivity. In facing such cross-jurisdictional issues, natural resource managers in Canada and the United States must grapple with conflicting objectives and important uncertainties, while considering the priorities of the public that live in the basin. The techniques and tools of decision analysis have been used successfully to deal with such decision problems in a range of environmental settings, but infrequently in the Great Lakes. The objective of this paper is to illustrate how such techniques might be brought to bear on an important, real decision currently facing Lake Erie resource managers and stakeholders: the choice of new phosphorus loading targets for the lake. The heart of our approach is a systematic elicitation of stakeholder preferences and an investigation of the degree to which different phosphorus-loading policies might satisfy ecosystem objectives. Results show that there are potential benefits to changing the historical policy of reducing phosphorus loads in Lake Erie.     

Identification of anthropogenic effects and seasonality on water quality in Daya Bay, South China Sea

Thirteen water quality parameters from 12 monitoring stations were collected to study the effects caused by climate and anthropogenic activities on water quality in 2003 in Daya Bay, South China Sea. The data matrix has been built according to the results, which were analyzed by fuzzy c-mean cluster (FCM) and cluster analysis (CA). This analysis has identified anthropogenic effects and seasonal characters of water quality. The dry and wet seasonality have been demonstrated with FCM and CA. The precipitation and the Southeast Asian monsoons, northeasterly from October to the next April and southwesterly from May to September have also an important influence on water quality in Daya Bay. In the spatial pattern, two groups have been classified with FCM and CA. Cluster I consisted of the sites S3, S8, S10 and S11 in the west and north coastal parts of Daya Bay. Cluster I is mainly related to anthropogenic activities such as fish-farming. Cluster II consisted of the rest of the stations in the center, east and south parts of Daya Bay. Cluster II is mainly related to seawater input from South China Sea. Thus, fuzzy c-mean cluster and cluster analysis can be an important tool for the successful characterization of regional-scale water quality.     

REGIONAL IMPACT OF WATER RESOURCE INVESTMENTS IN A DEVELOPING AREA1

ABSTRACT: Regional development and industrialization patterns are investigated and related via regression analysis to water resource investments for the island of Puerto Rico. Although results of this study indicate such investments have little immediate or short-term impact, significant relationships and variations in regional responses appear over longer time periods. This is shown by applying a variation of Zellner's method of performing seemingly unrelated regressions jointly. By this method, subsets of parameter coefficients of specific economic variables were restricted across regional equations while unrestricted coefficients were interpreted as explaining systematic regional variations in response to public investment. Regional differences, obtained by using this method, are frequently neglected when simply examining the overall development process. Among the more interesting results in terms of policy implications is the apparent significant relationship, over the period considered, between changes in the distribution of income and the pattern of water resource development.     

Local aspects of UK renewable energy development: exploring public beliefs and policy implications

Despite several recent UK initiatives to promote renewable energy development at the local level, little research has been carried out to investigate public beliefs about aspects of local renewable energy development. This research attempted to address this gap. Empirical data were collected at the Awel Aman Tawe development in South Wales immediately before and after a public participation process. The results indicate that support for specific aspects of local energy development (partnership with local communities, local use of generated energy and profits put back into the local community) was consistently high across time, with support for local ownership at a slightly lower level, yet still high. Secondly, socio-demographical analyses indicated that personal factors such as respondents' age, gender and employment status were important in shaping several of these beliefs. Since UK renewable energy development has often been controversial and subject to delay, results suggest that the adoption of a locally embedded development approach by public and private sector stakeholders will be strongly supported by local people. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to existing industry best practice guidelines and recent policy initiatives.     

HOW RIPARIAN ECOSYSTEMS ARE PROTECTED AT LAKE TAHOE1

Riparian ecosystems are designated for special protection from development and disturbance at Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) required protection of Stream Environment Zones (SEZs) in its Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin in 1987. These zones are identified by the presence of key indicators such as the evidence of surface water flow, riparian vegetation, near‐surface ground water, designated floodplain, and alluvial soils. They are mapped on each potential building site and assigned a setback that is also off limits to building construction. The SEZs are protected to maintain their functions and values, including flood attenuation, water quality enhancement, and wildlife habitat. Strict regulations control use or disturbance of SEZs on public and private property throughout the watershed. The TRPA has set restoration targets to increase the acreage of naturally functioning SEZs in the Tahoe Basin. Many SEZ restoration projects have been designed and implemented, but SEZ restoration targets have not been met. More SEZ restoration projects are being designed and funded each year. Restoration designers would benefit from increased effectiveness monitoring of completed projects and Web‐based dissemination of monitoring results.     

Local aspects of UK renewable energy development: exploring public beliefs and policy implications

Despite several recent UK initiatives to promote renewable energy development at the local level, little research has been carried out to investigate public beliefs about aspects of local renewable energy development. This research attempted to address this gap. Empirical data were collected at the Awel Aman Tawe development in South Wales immediately before and after a public participation process. The results indicate that support for specific aspects of local energy development (partnership with local communities, local use of generated energy and profits put back into the local community) was consistently high across time, with support for local ownership at a slightly lower level, yet still high. Secondly, socio-demographical analyses indicated that personal factors such as respondents' age, gender and employment status were important in shaping several of these beliefs. Since UK renewable energy development has often been controversial and subject to delay, results suggest that the adoption of a locally embedded development approach by public and private sector stakeholders will be strongly supported by local people. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to existing industry best practice guidelines and recent policy initiatives.