Water pollution control has been a top environmental policy priority of the world’s most developed countries for decades, and the focus of significant regulation and public and private spending. Yet, significant water quality problems remain, and trends for some pollutants are in the wrong direction. This book addresses the economics of water pollution control and water pollution control policy in agriculture, with an aim towards providing students, environmental policy analysts, and other environmental professionals with economic concepts and tools essential to understanding the problem and crafting solutions that can be effective and efficient. The book will also examine existing policies and proposed reforms in the developed world. Although this book addresses and has a general applicability to major water pollutants from agriculture (e.g., pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sediments, nutrients), it will focus on the sediment and nutrient pollution problem. The economic and scientific foundations for pollution management are best developed for these pollutants, and they are currently the top priorities of policy makers. Accordingly, the authors provide both highly salient and informative cases for developing concepts and methods of general applicability, with high profile examples such as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone in the US; the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe; and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

This open access textbook provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water management. By illustrating the interplay between the hydrological cycle and the rules and institutions that govern today’s water allocation policies, the authors develop a modern perspective on water management. Moreover, the book presents an in-depth assessment of the political and ethical dimensions of water management and its institutional embeddedness, by discussing distribution issues and issues of the enforceability of human rights in managing water resources. Given its scope, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and engineering, as well as practitioners in the water sector, seeking a deeper understanding of economic approaches to the study of water management.

A comprehensive introduction to the economics of water management, for engineers and natural scientists as well as economists, with self-contained treatment of all necessary economic concepts.

Water provides benefits as a commodity for agriculture, industry, and households, and as a public good such as fisheries habitat, water quality and recreational use. To aid in cost-benefit analysis under conditions where market determined price signals are usually unavailable, economists have developed a range of alternative valuation methods for measuring economic benefits. This volume provides the most comprehensive exposition to-date of the application of economic valuation methods to proposed water resources investments and policies. It provides a conceptual framework for valuation of both commodity and public good uses of water, addressing non-market valuation techniques appropriate to measuring public benefits - including water quality improvement, recreation, and fish habitat enhancement. The book describes the various measurement methods, illustrates how they are applied in practice, and discusses their strengths, limitations, and appropriate roles. In this second edition, all chapters have been thoroughly updated, and in particular the coverage of water markets and valuation of ecosystem services from water has been expanded. Robert Young, author of the 2005 edition, has been joined for this new edition by John Loomis, who brings additional expertise on ecosystem services and the environmental economics of water for recreational and other public good uses of water.

This book arose out of a paper that I wrote for the World Bank at the request of Ariel Dinar, the editor for the series in which this volume appears. I began that paper by pointing to the growing importance of demand-side considerations in water resources: "The provision of potable water is one of government's oldest functions with evidence of this activity stretching back thousands of years. During much of that time, water demands were taken as exogenously given and the principle task of authorities was defined as an engineering one: how to supply a given quantity of water at least cost. In recent years, however, concerns have arisen from observations of excessive water use, degraded water quality and continued inadequate service for many, especially the very poor. As a result of these and other concerns, there is a growing effort to view water resource allocation from a perspective that incorporates consumers' preferences along with supply constraints into management plans. " (Renzetti, 2000, p. 123). The purpose of this volume is to examine, in greater detail than was possible in that article, what is known regarding the economic characteristics of the demand for water. Thus, this book is meant to be an extended critical review of the state of the art.

This book examines linking policies and farm management to improve water quality.

Almost 5 years ago we began working together on research for the U.S. Environmental Protec tion Agency (EPA) to measure the benefits of water quality regulations. EPA had awarded a contract to Research Triangle Inst~ute (RTIl in response to a proposal that Bill wrote on measuring these benefits. After meeting with the EPA project officer, Dr Ann Fisher, the basic outlines of what would become this research were framed. Upon the suggestion of Bob Anderson, then chief of the Benefits Branch at EPA, we selected the Monongahela River as the focal point of a case study that would compare alternative benefit measurement approaches. Exactly how this case study would be done remained vague, but Ann urged that there be a survey and that nonuse benefits be included in the question naire design. Of course, Bill agreed. At the same time, Kerry was independently working on a review article that tied together some of the loose threads in the option value literature. He had also been thinking about how to measure option value, as well as working on ways to generalize the travel cost approach for estimating benefits of site attributes. Glenn Morris at RTI suggested that Bill have lunch with him and Kerry and that they could talk about Bill's research to see if there were any mutual interest. Over the lunch and Bill's ever present dessert in a Chapel Hill restaurant, we found out just how much we have in common.