Cost‐Effective Placement of Best Management Practices in a Watershed: Lessons Learned from Conservation Effects Assessment Project

This article reviews the key, cross‐cutting findings concerning watershed‐scale cost‐effective placement of best management practices (BMPs) emerging from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) competitive grants watershed studies. The synthesis focuses on two fundamental aspects of the cost‐effectiveness problem: (1) how to assess the location‐ and farmer‐specific costs of BMP implementation, and (2) how to decide on which BMPs need to be implemented and where within a given watershed. Major lessons learned are that (1) data availability remains a significant limiting factor in capturing within‐watershed BMP cost variability; (2) strong watershed community connections help overcome the cost estimation challenges; (3) detailing cost components facilitates the transferability of estimates to alternative locations and/or economic conditions; and (4) implicit costs vary significantly across space and farmers. Furthermore, CEAP studies showed that (5) evolutionary algorithms provide workable ways to identify cost‐effective BMP placements; (6) tradeoffs between total conservation costs and watershed‐scale cost‐effective water quality improvements are commonly large; (7) quality baseline information is essential to solving cost‐effectiveness problem; and (8) systemic and modeling uncertainties alter cost‐effective BMP placements considerably.     

以珠三角地区为例分析实施生态经济战略的重大效益

本文基于第一线调研和多年参政议政工作基础上,对珠三角区域的城市工业生态经济战略实施的过程、途径,可行性、原理及获得的重大效益进行了介绍与总结分析。研究指出,在实践过程中为更快更大规模地把生态经济战略与各地实际发展进程相结合加以推广和实施,则必须具备高度的社会责任感,勇于运用各种机会把生态经济的战略思路和实施策略很好地向社会各层面以及政府部门反映和建言,才能取得最好及更大的成效。     

The trouble with tanks: unsettling dominant Australian urban water management paradigms

Over the course of Australia's Millennium Drought, urban water managers gained more appreciation of householders' willingness and capacities to respond to water shortages and restrictions, including by installing rainwater tanks (RWTs) for watering gardens. How urban water managers regard tanks and tank users gives insight into their understandings of social sustainability, as found in interviews conducted in 2006 and 2010. These also revealed a growing distance between policymakers and water providers pursuing a broader approach to sustainability in their communities. The RWT is considered here as a limit case for paradigms of urban water management: it challenges conventional distinctions (such as provider/consumer) and heralds a new hydropolitics. These challenges are discussed as seven kinds of trouble with tanks: (1) incompatibility with the management model and vision of modernity enshrined in the ideal of centralised provision in control of accredited water experts; (2) anxieties about control and risk aroused by these private on-site facilities and their non-expert users; (3) equivocation over their environmental effects, normally assessed in hydrological terms that downplay the benefits of green streetscapes; (4) inexplicability of their popularity within dominant economically rationalist models of customers; (5) educational effects that exceed rationalist, individualist models of learning and require more socially realistic, culturally intelligent and practice-oriented approaches; (6) generation of enthusiasms that are spurned as threats to rationality instead of harnessed to energise the sustainability journey and (7) community-building effects that are unthinkable within the neoliberal customer paradigm but graspable to water managers through lay concepts like “dinner table conversations”.     

抓住机遇 迎接挑战 协同发展 "天人合一"

论述了中国入世对长江流域可持续发展所带来的影响、机遇和挑战，讨论了可持续发展思想的内涵及影响长江流域可持续发展的重要问题。认为可持续发展思想应包含：当代人要重视发展和持续性，不断提高人群生活质量和资源环境的承载能力，满足当代人的需求又不损害后代人的需求，满足一个地区、国家的需求又不损害别的地区、国家的需求，并努力补救上代人所留下的资源、环境创伤。我们应认识七种要素：人口、资源、环境、经济、社会、知识和文化之间的内在关系，必须协同处理。自然资源是发展的基础。中国开展环境保护工作已有20多年，特别是改革开放以来取得很多进展，目前需对严重环境问题采取更有力的措施。讨论了中国入世后面临的企业、农业、人才资源、高新技术产业、政府管理体制的创新和法制建设等问题，并着重研究了可持续发展文明观、加强绿色管理和绿色产品开发、知识经济和环保产业等关键问题。     

水权制度选择理论——基于交易成本、租值消散的研究

水资源配置大致存在完全政府配置、完全市场配置和准市场配置3种模式。中国正处于水权制度改革的过程中,水资源配置制度有从完全政府配置转向依靠市场配置的趋势。新制度经济学的交易成本理论和租值消散理论可以为新的水权制度的设计和选择提供依据。水资源的不同配置制度对应着相应的交易成本,相对较好的制度应该能在扣除交易成本之后获得较多的社会净租值。目前我国水资源管理的当务之急是根据经济理性,科学地界定好水资源的公有和私有权利,并由完全政府管制向市场体制转型。     

Benefit‐Cost Analysis of Integrated Water Resource Management: Accounting for Interdependence in the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan

Integrated water resource management (IWRM) requires accounting for many interrelated facets of water systems, water uses and stakeholders, and water management activities. The consequence is that project analysis must account for the nonseparability among the component parts of IWRM plans. This article presents a benefit‐cost (B‐C) analysis of a set of projects included in the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan proposed for the Yakima Basin in south‐central Washington State. The analysis accounts for interdependence among proposed water storage projects and between water storage and water market development in the context of historical and more adverse projected future climate scenarios. Focusing on irrigation benefits from storage, we show that the value of a given proposed storage project is lower when other proposed storage projects in the basin are implemented, and when water markets are functioning effectively. We find that none of the water storage projects satisfy a B‐C criterion, and that assuring proposed instream flow augmentation is less expensive by purchasing senior diversion rights than relying on new storage to provide it.     

Mountain substitutability and peak load pricing of high alpine peaks as a management tool to reduce environmental damage: A contingent valuation study

High alpine peaks throughout the world are under increasing environmental pressure from hikers, trekkers, and climbers. Colorado's “Fourteeners”, peaks with summits above 14,000 feet are no exception. Most of these peaks have no entrance fees, and reach ecological and social carrying capacity on weekends. This paper illustrates how a series of dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions can be used to evaluate substitutability between different alpine peaks and quantify the price responsiveness to an entrance fee. Using this approach, we find that peak load pricing would decrease use of popular Fourteeners in Colorado by 22%. This reduction is due almost entirely to substitution, rather than income effects. There is also price inelastic demand, as 60% of the hikers find no substitution for their specific Fourteener at the varying cost increases posed in the survey. The no substitute group has a mean net benefit of $294 per hiker, per trip, considerably higher than visitor net benefits in most recreational use studies.     

Fair fund distribution for a municipal incinerator using GIS-based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Burning municipal solid waste (MSW) can generate energy and reduce the waste volume, which delivers benefits to society through resources conservation. But current practices by society are not sustainable because the associated environmental impacts of waste incineration on urbanized regions have been a long-standing concern in local communities. Public reluctance with regard to accepting the incinerators as typical utilities often results in an intensive debate concerning how much welfare is lost for those residents living in the vicinity of those incinerators. As the measure of welfare change with respect to environmental quality constraints nearby these incinerators remains critical, new arguments related to how to allocate the fair fund among affected communities became a focal point in environmental management. Given the fact that most County fair fund rules allow a great deal of flexibility for redistribution, little is known about what type of methodology may be a good fit to determine the distribution of such a fair fund under uncertainty. This paper purports to demonstrate a system-based approach that helps any fair fund distribution, which is made with respect to residents' possible claim for fair damages due to the installation of a new incinerator. Holding a case study using integrated geographic information system (GIS) and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) for finding out the most appropriate distribution strategy between two neighboring towns in Taipei County, Taiwan demonstrates the application potential. Participants in determining the use of a fair fund also follow a highly democratic procedure where all stakeholders involved eventually express a high level of satisfaction with the results facilitating the final decision making process. It ensures that plans for the distribution of such a fair fund were carefully thought out and justified with a multi-faceted nature that covers political, socio-economic, technical, environmental, public health, and industrial aspects.     

Sustainable use of water in the Aegean Islands

Water demands in the Aegean Islands have increased steadily over the last decade as a result of a building boom for new homes, hotels, and resorts. The increase in water demand has resulted in the disruption of past sustainable water management practices. At present, most freshwater needs are met through the use of the limited groundwater, desalinated seawater, and freshwater importation. Wastewater reclamation, not used extensively, can serve as an alternative source of water, for a variety of applications now served with desalinated and imported water. Three alternative processes: desalination, importation, and water reclamation are compared with respect to cost, energy requirements and long-term sustainability. Based on the comparisons made, water reclamation and reuse should be components of any long-term water resources management strategy.     

The valuation of historical sites: a case study of Valdivia,Chile

The economic valuation of cultural heritage is an area of increasing interest and an important research topic in the emerging field of cultural economics. Many services and values associated with cultural heritage are not traded in markets, and their estimation requires methods developed for the valuation of non-market goods, such as those used in environmental economics. This paper applies the contingent valuation method with double dichotomous choice to estimate the value of historical sites in the city of Valdivia, Chile. The valuation exercise was implemented by designing a hypothetical guided walking tour to a cluster of historical sites in the city centre, and surveying tourists visiting the city during the summer of 2004. Parametric and non-parametric statistical methods were used to estimate the survival distribution and the mean and median estimates of the willingness-to-pay (WTP). The study emphasizes the importance of explicitly treating heterogeneous preferences and the sensitivity of the survival distribution to the estimation methods used.