What’s Wrong with the Tap? Examining Perceptions of Tap Water and Bottled Water at Purdue University

The environmental impacts of bottled water prompted us to explore drinking water choices at Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, IN. A random sample of 2,045 Purdue University students, staff, and faculty was invited to participate in an online survey. The survey assessed current behaviors as well as perceived barriers and benefits to drinking tap water versus bottled water. 677 surveys were completed for a response rate of 33.1%. We then conducted qualitative interviews with a purposive sample of university undergraduates (n = 21) to obtain contextual insights into the survey results and the beliefs of individuals with a variety of drinking water preferences. This study revealed that women drink disproportionately more bottled water then men while undergraduate students drink more than graduate students, staff and faculty. The study also uncovered a widespread belief that recycling eliminates the environmental impacts of bottled water. Important barriers to drinking tap water at Purdue include: perceived risks from tap water and the perceived safety of bottled water, preferring the taste of bottled water, and the convenience of drinking bottled water. The qualitative interviews revealed that drinking water choices can be influenced by several factors—especially whether individuals trust tap water to be clean—but involve varying levels of complexity. The implications of these results for social marketing strategies to promote tap water are discussed.     

Managing Water to Protect Fish: A Review of California’s Environmental Water Account, 2001–2005

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the landward reach of the San Francisco Estuary, provides habitat for threatened delta smelt, endangered winter-run Chinook salmon, and other species of concern. It is also the location of huge freshwater diversion facilities that entrain large numbers of fish. Reducing the entrainment of listed fishes into these facilities has required curtailment of pumping, reducing the reliability of water deliveries. We reviewed the first 5 years (2001–2005) of the Environmental Water Account (EWA), a program instituted to resolve conflicts between protecting listed fishes and providing a reliable water supply. The EWA provided fishery agencies with control over 0.2–0.4 km³ of water to be used for fish protection at no cost to users of exported water, and fish agencies guaranteed no disruption of water supply for fish protection. The EWA was successful in reducing uncertainty in water supply; however, its contribution to the recovery of listed fishes was unclear. We estimated the effectiveness of the EWA to be modest, increasing the survival of winter-run Chinook salmon by 0–6% (dependent on prescreen mortality), adult delta smelt by 0–1%, and juvenile delta smelt by 2–4%. Allocating EWA water for a single life stage of one species could provide larger gains in survival. An optimally allocated EWA of equal size to the median of the first 5 years could increase abundance of juvenile delta smelt up to 7% in the springs of dry years. If the EWA is to become a long-term program, estimates of efficacy should be refined. If the program is to be held accountable for quantitative increases in fish populations, it will be necessary to integrate scientific, possibly experimental, approaches.     

Does More Storage Give California More Water?

Increasing reservoir storage is commonly proposed to mitigate increasing water demand and provide drought reserves, especially in semiarid regions such as California. This paper examines the value of expanding surface reservoir capacity in California using hydroeconomic modeling for historical conditions, a future warm‐dry climate, and California's recently adopted policy to end groundwater overdraft. Results show expanding surface storage capacity rarely provides sizable economic value in most of California. On average, expanding facilities north of California's Delta provides some benefit in 92% of 82 years modeled under historical conditions and in 61% of years modeled in a warm‐dry climate. South of California's Delta, expanding storage capacity provides no benefits in 14% of years modeled under historical conditions and 99% of years modeled with a warm‐dry climate. Results vary across facilities between and within regions. The limited benefit of surface storage capacity expansion to statewide water supply should be considered in planning California's water infrastructure.     

Water，水，不能“水”

如今很多人的眼睛都盯着水。 从2012年7月1日起,我国强制实施新的《生活饮用水卫生标准》,这个标准要求水质总体与世卫组织水质标准接轨。作为环保志愿者,南京两位市民——程渊和李春华,向全国32个城市的自来水厂邮寄了政府信息公开申请表,要求公开自来水水质数据。     

Implementing the EU Water Framework Directive in Norway: Bridging the Gap Between Water Management Networks and Elected Councils?

To handle the challenge of complex cross-sector and multilevel coordination in the implementation of the European Union Water Framework Directive, Norway has established multilevel governance networks. Observers have pointed to a risk of such governance arrangements being dominated by experts. This article studies the highly complex multilevel governance networks of water management in Norway, and unveils the importance of political anchorage of such governance networks at local and regional levels. The study finds evidence that political anchorage matters for further network achievements. Because the water governance networks are subordinated to the hierarchy of government, they need to ‘talk to' the system of hierarchical government in order to be effective. In this regard, it seems crucial that networks are politically anchored. Furthermore, the study unveils the important role of political leadership and network managers in ensuring political anchorage.     

Public-Private Partnerships in China’s Urban Water Sector

During the past decades, the traditional state monopoly in urban water management has been debated heavily, resulting in different forms and degrees of private sector involvement across the globe. Since the 1990s, China has also started experiments with new modes of urban water service management and governance in which the private sector is involved. It is premature to conclude whether the various forms of private sector involvement will successfully overcome the major problems (capital shortage, inefficient operation, and service quality) in China’s water sector. But at the same time, private sector involvement in water provisioning and waste water treatments seems to have become mainstream in transitional China.     

Redressing China’s Strategy of Water Resource Exploitation

China, with the confrontation of water-related problems as an element of its long history, has been investing heavily in water engineering projects over the past few decades based on the assumption that these projects can solve its water problems. However, the anticipated benefits did not really occur, or at least not as large as expected. Instead, the results involved additional frustrations, such as biodiversity losses and human-induced disasters (i.e., landslides and earthquakes). Given its inherent shortcomings, the present engineering-dominated strategy for the management of water resources cannot help solve China’s water problems and achieve its goal of low-carbon transformation. Therefore, the present strategy for water resources exploitation needs to be reevaluated and redressed. A policy change to achieve better management of Chinese rivers is urgently needed.     

Does Riparian Fencing Protect Stream Water Quality in Cattle-Grazed Lands?

Environmental Management - Cattle degrade streams by increasing sediment, nutrient, and fecal bacteria levels. Riparian fencing is one best management practice that may protect water quality within...     

Water security: Old concepts,new package,what value?

“Water security” has come to infiltrate prominent discourse in the international water and development community, and achieving it is often viewed as a new water sector target. Despite the elevated status that the concept has increasingly acquired, understandings of the term are murky and quantification is rare. To promote a more tangible understanding of the concept, this paper develops an index for evaluating water security at a country level. The index is comprised of indicators in five components considered to be critical to the concept: (i) basic needs; (ii) agricultural production; (iii) the environment; (iv) risk management; and (v) independence. Achieving water security in these components can be considered necessary but insufficient criteria to measure the achievement of security in related areas such as health, livelihoods, and industry. After populating indicators with data from Asia‐Pacific countries, results are interpreted and the viability of methods is discussed. This effort comprises an important first step for quantifying and assessing water security across countries, which should spur more concrete understanding of the term and discussion of its added value.     

The Use of Irrigation Water in Bulgaria’s Plovdiv Region During Transition

The amount of water Bulgaria uses for irrigation sharply declined during the transition. Large sections of the existing irrigation systems were abandoned, and those still in use are hardly maintained. Crops such as wheat and barley have replaced more water-intensive crops, such as vegetables, rice, and maize. This problem has an impact on the future development of agriculture and the allocation of the countrys water resources. The central argument is that land fragmentation in the wake of decollectivization and restitution contributes to the irrigation systems abandonment. This article focuses on the institutional factors involved, but also considers additional factors that might have influenced the process. Further, it examines the causes driving these changes and analyzes their effect on irrigation. It is based on a review of the relevant legislation as well as fieldwork in 17 villages located in the Plovdiv region of Bulgaria. The article concludes that institutional settings, in addition to changes in large-scale market forces and the state enforcement mechanism, have contributed to the irrigation decline in Bulgaria.Published online Note: This version was published online in June 2005 with the cover date of August 2004.     

Can Desalination and Clean Energy Combined Help to Alleviate Global Water Scarcity?

The major present hindrance in using desalination to help alleviate global water scarcity is the cost of this technology, which, in turn is due to energy cost involved. This study examines historical trends in desalination and breaks up the cost of desalination into energy based and nonenergy based. It then develops the learning curves (relationship between cumulative production and market price) for desalination. Assuming that the photovoltaic (PV) technology will be the dominant form of energy used in the desalination process, the existing PV learning curve and desalination learning curve are combined to explore the viability of large‐scale adoption of desalination in the future. The world has been divided into seven regions and it is assumed that water demand from desalinated water will be met only within the 100‐km coastal belt. It is shown that, in most of the regions, other than sub‐Saharan Africa, Central America, and South Asia (where water tariffs are low), the desalination (without considering energy) becomes viable by 2040. For PV technology, less than 1 million MW per annum growth is required till 2050 to make it affordable. Globally, desalination with renewable energy can become a viable option to replace domestic and industrial water demand in the 100‐km coastal belt by 2050.     

Identifying Key Factors in Homeowner’s Adoption of Water Quality Best Management Practices

The recognition of the significance of the residential environment in contributing to non-point source (NPS) pollution and the inherently dispersed nature of NPS pollution itself that presents significant challenges to effective regulation has led to the creation and dissemination of best management practices (BMPs) that can reduce the impacts of NPS pollution (Environmental Protection Agency US, Protecting water quality from urban runoff, http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/nps_urban-facts_final.pdf, 2003). However, very few studies have examined the factors that influence the adoption of BMPs by residential homeowners, despite the fact that residential environments have been identified as one of the most significant contributors to NPS pollution. Given this need, the purpose of this project was to explore how demographic and knowledge-based factors predict adoption of residential BMPs in an urbanizing watershed in Northern Illinois using statistical analyses of survey data collected as part of a watershed planning process. The findings indicate that broad knowledge of BMPs is the strongest predictor of use for a specific BMP. Knowledge of BMPs is strongly correlated with their use, which reinforces the need for educational programs, even among those assumed to be knowledgeable about BMPs.     

Public Versus Private: Does It Matter for Water Conservation? Insights from California

This article asks three connected questions: First, does the public view private and public utilities differently, and if so, does this affect attitudes to conservation? Second, do public and private utilities differ in their approaches to conservation? Finally, do differences in the approaches of the utilities, if any, relate to differences in public attitudes? We survey public attitudes in California toward (hypothetical but plausible) voluntary and mandated water conservation, as well as to price increases, during a recent period of shortage. We do this by interviewing households in three pairs of adjacent public and private utilities. We also survey managers of public and private urban water utilities to see if they differ in their approaches to conservation and to their customers. On the user side we do not find pronounced differences, though a minority of customers in all private companies would be more willing to conserve or pay higher prices under a public operator. No respondent in public utility said the reverse. Negative attitudes toward private operators were most pronounced in the pair marked by a controversial recent privatization and a price hike. Nonetheless, we find that California’s history of recurrent droughts and the visible role of the state in water supply and drought management undermine the distinction between public and private. Private utilities themselves work to underplay the distinction by stressing the collective ownership of the water source and the collective value of conservation. Overall, California’s public utilities appear more proactive and target-oriented in asking their customers to conserve than their private counterparts and the state continues to be important in legitimating and guiding conservation behavior, whether the utility is in public hands or private.     

Does External Funding Help Adaptation? Evidence from Community-Based Water Management in the Colombian Andes

Despite debate regarding whether, and in what form, communities need external support for adaptation to environmental change, few studies have examined how external funding impacts adaptation decisions in rural resource-dependent communities. In this article, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to assess how different funding sources influence the initiative to adapt to water scarcity in the Colombian Andes. We compare efforts to adapt to water scarcity in 111 rural Andean communities with varied dependence on external funding for water management activities. Findings suggest that despite efforts to use their own internal resources, communities often need external support to finance adaptation strategies. However, not all external financial support positively impacts a community’s abilities to adapt. Results show the importance of community-driven requests for external support. In cases where external support was unsolicited, the results show a decline, or “crowding-out,” in community efforts to adapt. In contrast, in cases where communities initiated the request for external support to fund their own projects, findings show that external intervention is more likely to enhance or “crowds-in” community-driven adaptation.     

Conditional Water Rights in the Western United States: Introducing Uncertainty to Prior Appropriation?

In the prior‐appropriation water rights regimes that prevail in the arid western United States, claims to annually variable surface water flows are fulfilled based on the order of their establishment. The two‐step process used to establish an appropriative water right in all 17 conterminous western states creates a temporary phase, or conditional water right, which has a priority date but no actual water use. We provide a review of the legal basis for these conditional water rights and demonstrate the potential uncertainty they introduce to current water users. We then present a complete census of conditional water rights in Colorado, including their amounts, ages, and uses. At the end of 2012 there were a large number of conditional water rights in Colorado (some over 90 years old) equal to 61% of the perfected water rights. Many of the controversial conditional water rights in Colorado have been associated with unconventional oil production in the northwestern portion of the state; however, conditional water rights are ubiquitous across the state and across many use types. In several basins, their existence can introduce uncertainty to some of the most senior water rights holders. Nevertheless, in most of the state, the effects of conditional water rights are restricted to a relatively junior class of water users. This work quantifies for the first time the result, in one state, of a peculiar aspect of water law common across all western prior‐appropriation states.     

Where Did the Agricultural Nonpoint Source Trades Go? Lessons from Virginia Water Quality Trading Programs

Governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and agricultural organizations promote water quality trading programs as an innovative policy to engage agricultural producers in conservation activities. Cost analyses suggest regulated sources can reduce compliance costs by purchasing agricultural nonpoint source credits. Yet, such “point‐nonpoint” trades are rare. This article assesses the demand for agricultural nonpoint sources in well‐developed nutrient trading programs in Virginia for industrial and municipal wastewater treatment plants, municipal stormwater programs, and land developers. Evidence suggests nutrient trading programs in Virginia will not stimulate investments in pollutant reduction practices on working agricultural lands. The lack of demand for agricultural nonpoint source credits can be attributed to a substantial degree to the design features and incentives present in multiple overlapping regulatory programs. The legal setting that dampens regulated source demand for nonpoint source credits in Virginia is broadly representative of conditions found elsewhere in the United States.