Can Nonlinear Water Pricing Help to Mitigate Drought Effects in Temperate Countries?

Abstract

The notion of drought is most often associated with the aridity of landscapes and vegetation. But a green landscape can hide a frequent imbalance between water availability and the quantity necessary to maintain rivers in a suitable state, to satisfy different water needs. This is the case, for example, in the French region called New Aquitaine. Regularly, "drought" crisis committees are set up there to limit water use through administrative constraints, which is technically difficult and costly for many, and with an overall unsatisfactory situation from rural areas to the coast. But in summer, water consumption is mainly due to irrigation. Some water resource managers have consequently set up an original non-linear water pricing system for irrigation to achieve several objectives: above all, to limit water consumption in order to respect a minimum flow rate in rivers, to anticipate water supply-demand imbalances before agricultural plantations are made, to allocate water to the users who value it best, to recover water supply costs, to be transparent and sufficiently simple in its application to be acceptable. In this chapter, we propose to describe one of such original pricing systems, as well as some of its main mathematical properties and its practical interests.