“Liberating” social knowledges for water management,and more broadly environmental management,through “place-change planning”

In response to the big policy problem of increasing failures of traditional, largely technical, policy approaches to constructively address transformational or radical socio-environmental problems from major facility siting, landscape modification, and/or new environmental management at the local level, this paper introduces “place-change planning”. This concept is applied to recent calls by Australian water scientists and policy-makers “to liberate the knowledge, skills and individual leadership and collaboration of all stakeholders to reflect a more decentralised, disaggregated and localised water world”. Local community stakeholders appear the most neglected stakeholder currently in such water management, despite increasing international recognition of their importance for constructive change in transitional sustainability contexts. As such, place-change policy design focuses on the importance of collaborative participatory approaches for better understanding of the underlying rationalities, and, by association, of better liberating the social knowledges, of place-based local communities for better policy input to realise new visions of sustainable water management, and beyond.     

水资源多目标协同配置:全价值基础上的框架研究

从资源的视角而言,水资源具有的社会、经济、生态属性中,社会属性和生态属性所提供的生态功能和服务多是外部性和非市场的,其价值在纯粹的市场驱动下难以充分实现。从资源管理视角而言,水资源多目标协同配置的实质是水资源多重属性功能和服务的均衡。因此,将具有外部性的社会、生态功能和服务与具有经济价值的功能和服务同时纳入配置框架,是实现多目标协同配置实践的关键问题。本文在回顾水资源配置和水资源非市场价值评估的相关研究的基础上,围绕我国现行水资源配置存在的主要问题,通过水资源的全价值(市场价值和非市场价值)将其多属性功能和公众意愿纳入水资源多目标协同配置中,从水资源管理信息系统、全价值评估和配置管理的绩效评价三个方面构建了水资源配置的多目标协同框架,最后提出相关的保障政策建议。     

MEASURING THE VALUE OF POTABLE WATER IN PARTIALLY MONETIZED RURAL ECONOMIES1

ABSTRACT: A pilot study was conducted to test the potential of the Contingent Valuation Methodology (CVM) to reveal the value of non-market goods in a partially monetized subsistence economy. CVM was used to estimate the willingness to pay, in the form of labor, for potable drinking water in a rural river-based community located in the Esmeraldas state of northwest Ecuador. Surveys were administered by personal interviews with families living along the waterways of the Santiago river system who used river water for cooking, drinking, washing, and waste disposal. The mean willingness to pay represented over 23 percent of real income, or 1.4 days per week for a period of one year. Results of multiple regression analysis identified the history of water-related health problems and the number of working adults in a household as significant determinants of willingness to pay. Using a non-monetary, rather than a monetary measure of willingness to pay may provide a more accurate representation of value in a subsistence economy where the use of money is limited. The potential for CVM to measure the benefits of non-market goods in rural developing regions whose economies are only partially monetized is demonstrated.     

Institutions for Interstate Water Resources Management1

Abstract:  This paper evaluates alternative approaches to management of interstate water resources in the United States (U.S.), including interstate compacts, interstate associations, federal‐state partnerships, and federal‐interstate compacts. These governance structures provide alternatives to traditional federalism or U.S. Supreme Court litigation for addressing problems that transcend political boundaries and functional responsibilities. Interstate compacts can provide a forum for ongoing collaboration and are popular mechanisms for allocating water rights among the states. Federal‐interstate compacts, such as the Delaware River Basin Compact and federal‐state partnerships, such as the National Estuary Program, are also effective and complementary approaches to managing water resources. However, all of these approaches can only make modest improvements in managing water resources given the complicated and fragmented nature of our federalist system of government.     

Benefits Transfer and Low Flow Alleviation: What Lessons for Environmental Valuation in the UK?

Use of environmental valuation and benefits transfer in a recent legal ruling in the UK between Thames Water Utilities and the Environment Agency over water abstraction costs appeared to set an unfortunate precedent. In the first attempt to fulfil its statutory duties, the Agency was thwarted in its use and interpretation of non-market valuation techniques, in particular, the vexed issue of how to aggregate the results of valuation studies in original sites or those to where values might be transferred. The ruling has broader implications for water pricing and resource development by the industry. Far from being a blow for either cost-benefit analysis or environmental valuation, the decision highlights some of the research imperatives for the derivation of non-market values by economists and their translation for use in government decisions.     

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT SALT WATER INTRUSION?1

Almost thirty years after the first known publication on salt water problems published in 1855 by Braithwaite, two investigators developed an approximate theory to find the boundaries of fresh water lenses in coastal aquifers. Their theory is now known as Ghyben-Herzberg Theory. Although their theory is based on oversimplified assumptions, it has stimulated others through various periods of time. A review of the main investigations in this field is summarized in this paper. The discussions are subdivided into three main eras: (1) The period through which the problems were identified and field observations were explained (from 1855 until the early forties); (2) the analytic approaches during the period from 1940 to the late sixties; and (3) the refined techniques during the past three years. A brief summary of the recharge methods is also given in addition to a more or less comprehensive list of references.     

Market and nonmarket values of the Georgia landscape

Natural landscapes produce goods and services, such as fish, wildlife, recreation, climate control, that are not adequately incorporated in their market values. Contingent Valuation (CV) and Energy Analysis (EA) approaches were used to estimate the nonmarket value of forests in Georgia. Both methods yielded similar estimates of approximately $200 ha^–1, which was 31% of the total market and nonmarket value of forests. Energy analysis was also used to estimate the nonmarket value of the major land uses in Georgia. Relative contributions of nonmarket value to total value ranged from 0.1% for urban areas to approximately 100% for wetlands. For the state as a whole, nonmarket production of natural and developed ecosystems was estimated at $2.6 billion. This value is comparable to annual marketed agricultural ($2.8 billion) and timber ($4.5 billion) production, both very important industries in Georgia. Changing land use patterns in Georgia and elsewhere are likely to be accompanied by shifts in the relative importances of market and non-market values.     

Experiences in the water resources development and management for sustainable use in Zimbabwe

Fresh water has become a very topical, emotive and sensitive issue in Zimbabwe following the recent continued droughts in conjunction with lack of finance to expand water resources development. Heated debates have arisen over the availability, allocation, distribution, disbursement and conservation of this precious resource. A great deal of inefficiency has also resulted from Government Ministries or Departments playing all the roles, from policymaking to supply operations. Government authorities often make the mistake of controlling day-to-day management of water and sewage services. In fact, greater accountability results when Government authorities focus on policymaking, establishing regulatory regimes that provide incentives for achieving goals and sanctions for serious failures, while giving sufficient autonomy to entities responsible for investment and operations to control outcomes. It is becoming more and more evident throughout the world that provision of water, as opposed to the planning and allocation of the water resource, should be handled by commercial undertakers. Indeed, Zimbabwe and its neighbours are currently involved with changing the status of their water departments to corporate entities; Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia have already commercialised or are currently in the process of commercialising their freshwater supply services.     

Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management

The conceptual underpinnings for adaptive management are simple; there will always be inherent uncertainty and unpredictability in the dynamics and behavior of complex ecological systems as a result non-linear interactions among components and emergence, yet management decisions must still be made. The strength of adaptive management is in the recognition and confrontation of such uncertainty. Rather than ignore uncertainty, or use it to preclude management actions, adaptive management can foster resilience and flexibility to cope with an uncertain future, and develop safe to fail management approaches that acknowledge inevitable changes and surprises. Since its initial introduction, adaptive management has been hailed as a solution to endless trial and error approaches to complex natural resource management challenges. However, its implementation has failed more often than not. It does not produce easy answers, and it is appropriate in only a subset of natural resource management problems. Clearly adaptive management has great potential when applied appropriately. Just as clearly adaptive management has seemingly failed to live up to its high expectations. Why? We outline nine pathologies and challenges that can lead to failure in adaptive management programs. We focus on general sources of failures in adaptive management, so that others can avoid these pitfalls in the future. Adaptive management can be a powerful and beneficial tool when applied correctly to appropriate management problems; the challenge is to keep the concept of adaptive management from being hijacked for inappropriate use.     

Re-politicising water governance: exploring water re-allocations in terms of justice

Contemporary socio-economic transformations in South Asia are creating increasingly serious water problems (scarcity, flooding, pollution) and conflicts. Conflicts over water distribution, water-derived benefits, and risks often play out along axes of social differentiation like caste, wealth, and gender. Those with least power, rights, and voice suffer lack of access, exclusion, dispossession, and further marginalisation, resulting in livelihood insecurity or increased vulnerability to risks. In this paper we propose analysing these problems as problems of justice – problems of distribution, recognition, and political participation. Drawing on wider environmental justice approaches, a specific water justice focus needs to include both the specific characteristics of water as a resource and the access, rights, and equity dimensions of its control. We argue that recognising water problems as problems of justice requires a re-politicisation of water, as mainstream approaches to water resources, water governance, and legislation tend to normalise or naturalise their – basically political – distributional assumptions and implications. An interdisciplinary approach that sees water as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here. We illustrate these conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.     

The Axford Debate Revisited: A Case Study Illustrating Different Approaches to the Aggregation of Benefits Data

Recent debate following the rejection of the Environment Agency case regarding an application for water abstraction at Axford on the River Kennet has focused upon the benefits procedure employed for aggregating non-user benefits which underpinned the economic case put forward by the Agency (although this was not the reason cited by the inquiry for rejection of the case). Commentators have seen this case as setting an unfortunate precedent for the use of economic assessments in such resource management issues. The paper presents a number of highly tractable alternative methods for the aggregation of benefits estimates designed to address the central problems of the definition of a relevant aggregation population and a potential decay of values with increasing distance from a given valuation site. These methods are tested using data obtained from a national survey of non-users of a specific natural area. Results from this application indicate that simpler approaches such as that used at the Axford inquiry may result in aggregate benefits estimates which are very substantially larger than those produced by our proposed alternative approaches to aggregation.     

Water distribution system failure: a framework for forensic analysis

The main purpose of a water distribution system (WDS) is to deliver safe water of desirable quality, quantity and continuity to consumers. However, in many cases, a WDS fails to fulfill its goal owing to structural and associated hydraulic failures and/or water quality failures. The impact of these failures can be reduced significantly if preventive actions are taken based on their potential of occurrences or if a failure occurs and is detected within a minimum period of time after its occurrence. The aim of this research was to develop a forensic system for WDS failures. As part of the proposed forensic analysis, a framework has been developed, which investigates structural and associated hydraulic failures as well as water quality failures and integrates all failure investigation under a single platform. Under this framework, four different models have been developed to evaluate and identify structural and associated hydraulic failures and water quality failures. If a failure is detected in the system, the framework is capable of identifying the most probable location of the failure. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, the developed models have been tested and implemented in different WDSs.     

Cryptocurrency: governance for what was meant to be ungovernable

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to revolutionize the exchange of information and money through blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Despite the promise of such underlying technologies, their reliance upon distributed consensus processes to approve software updates raises the potential for governance failures to destabilize a given cryptocurrency. These governance failures, known as ‘hard forks,’ can separate a cryptocurrency into two rival camps. Where such events can destabilize a given cryptocurrency’s value, and instill distrust in the capacity of a cryptocurrency to survive as a reliable vehicle of exchange, it is imperative for the cryptocurrency community to improve their governance processes and limit the potential for hard forks to occur. While the distributed nature of cryptocurrency governance makes any traditional governing process unlikely to succeed, anticipatory approaches that establish thresholds and metrics to determine when software reform is necessary may help alleviate the governance failures presented by many hard forks.     

Managing Water Stress: The Logic of Demand Side Infrastructure Planning

Management of water supply in Britain is increasingly facing up to the problems posed by supply-led strategies. Although the eradication of water stress has traditionally been viewed as a techno-managerial problem, with supply being increased to meet rising demand, this is no longer possible as a general solution. Pressures both from government and from voluntary bodies are leading to approaches which manage the level of demand, and which recognize that water may, for various reasons, be in relatively short supply. The issues are illustrated by a case study of a recent tourist development, in which demand side management measures were extensively utilized.     

CHALLENGES IN GROUND WATER REMEDIATION: DENSE NONAQUEOUS PHASE LIQUIDS1

ABSTRACT: Dense nonaqueous phase liquid (DNAPL) contaminated ground water has proven to be exceptionally difficult to remediate for both physical and chemical reasons. Since DNAPL's are denser than water, their movement is not governed by the direction of ground water flow as is generally the case for other ground water contaminants. Additionally, DNAPLs' interactions with aquifer solids through processes such as sorption tend to make the pollution linger or sometimes apparently disappear, only to return later. Unfortunately, pump-and-treat systems, the traditional way ground water contamination is addressed, have not been effective in cleaning DNAPL contaminated water. Other remediation technologies continue to be developed to address these problems. Policy changes will also be necessary to effectively address the difficulties associated with ground water remediation.     

Water resources issues of small island developing states

The water resources of most small island developing states (SIDS) are often very limited and require special consideration to ensure that they are developed and managed in a sustainable manner. Many small islands, typically located in the humid tropics, have no surface water resources and rely on limited groundwater resources in the form of thin freshwater lenses. The exposed location of small islands makes them particularly vulnerable to natural disasters such as cyclones, floods and droughts. Pollution from population centres and from agricultural and other activities is an increasing problem. This article provides an overview of the water resources of small islands, and the main problems and issues related to water resources. Some suggested solutions, based on practical experiences, are offered for water resource assessment and monitoring programmes, and water resource development. Water resource policy, planning and management issues are also addressed, and suggested approaches for resolving some of the major water resource problems presented.     

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN WATERSHEDS AND ECOREGIONS1

ABSTRACT: In an effort to adopt more holistic ecosystem approaches to resource assessment and management, many state and federal agencies have begun using watershed or ecoregion frameworks. Although few would question the need to make this move from dealing with problems and issues on a case by case or point-type basis to broader regional contexts, misunderstanding of each of the frameworks has resulted in inconsistency in their use and ultimate effectiveness. The focus of this paper is on the clarification of both frameworks. We stress that the issue is not whether to use watersheds (or basins or hydrologic units) or ecoregions for needs such as developing ecosystem management and non-point source pollution strategies or structuring water quality regulatory programs, but how to correctly use the frameworks together. Definitions, uses, and misuses of each of the frameworks are discussed as well as ways watersheds and ecoregions can be and have been used together effectively to meet resource management needs.     

RESERVOIR RELEASES TO USES WITH DIFFERENT RELIABILITY REQUIREMENTS1

ABSTRACT: Releases from a reservoir may be allocated to a number of uses, each of which may require a given volume of water at a different reliability. The paper provides a method that can be used to estimate the volume of water associated with a given reliability for each use of water when the proportion of releases allocated to each use is known. These results can be used to evaluate the meeting of specified objectives under a published release policy derived by stationary stochastic dynamic programming. The results can also be used to solve water allocation problems when the probability distribution of available water is known (or can be estimated) and water has multiple uses, each of which has different volume and reliability requirements.     

INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS IN COMMUNITY DECISION-MAKING: A CASE EXAMPLE FROM SOUTHERN ARIZONA1

ABSTRACT: While there is increasing recognition of the need to consider institutional factors in water resources decision-making, there are few specific methods available to use in actually conducting an institutional analysis. The lack of such methods has spurred interest in going beyond begging water resource agencies to conduct institutional analyses to developing more refined tools to use in the analysis process. However, as more complex systems of analysis are developed, it is important not to lose sight of the value that less objective and participatory approaches to institutional analysis may have in solving institutional problems. Improving the techniques and tools of institutional analysis should not mean developing complex methods or models that can only be manipulated and understood by the trained analyst. The advantages and disadvantages of full participation by stakeholders in the institutional analysis process are discussed by describing the efforts of a local community organization in Tucson, Arizona, to study the need for a basinwide management entity.     

Recreational Stream Crossing Effects on Sediment Delivery and Macroinvertebrates in Southwestern Virginia,USA

Trail-based recreation has increased over recent decades, raising the environmental management issue of soil erosion that originates from unsurfaced, recreational trail systems. Trail-based soil erosion that occurs near stream crossings represents a non-point source of pollution to streams. We modeled soil erosion rates along multiple-use (hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding) recreational trails that approach culvert and ford stream crossings as potential sources of sediment input and evaluated whether recreational stream crossings were impacting water quality based on downstream changes in macroinvertebrate-based indices within the Poverty Creek Trail System of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in southwestern Virginia, USA. We found modeled soil erosion rates for non-motorized recreational approaches that were lower than published estimates for an off-road vehicle approach, bare horse trails, and bare forest operational skid trail and road approaches, but were 13 times greater than estimated rates for undisturbed forests and 2.4 times greater than a 2-year old clearcut in this region. Estimated soil erosion rates were similar to rates for skid trails and horse trails where best management practices (BMPs) had been implemented. Downstream changes in macroinvertebrate-based indices indicated water quality was lower downstream from crossings than in upstream reference reaches. Our modeled soil erosion rates illustrate recreational stream crossing approaches have the potential to deliver sediment into adjacent streams, particularly where BMPs are not being implemented or where approaches are not properly managed, and as a result can negatively impact water quality below stream crossings.