Water Sustainability eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Assessing Socio-Technical Resistances to Public Policy Instruments: Insights from Water Performance Indicators in the Grenoble Area (France)","authors":"Thomas Bolognesi, A. Brochet, Y. Renou","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2960134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2960134","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the phenomenon of local resistance to regulation by instruments in the water sector. Governance failures are mainly explained by concentrating on governance design, considering regulation as a set of control mechanisms. We propose an alternative perspective by putting the emphasis on resistance phenomena within services. This is motivated by the observation of misuse of performance indicators by local actors in urban water systems in Europe. We assume that resistances have significant impact on regulation process and efficiency. Therefore, opening the black box of resistances, we show that they are frequent, impactful and not only the consequence of opportunism. These results underline a crucial limitation of public policies and regulations that are based on New public management or classical economics of regulation.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114845949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Clustered into Control: Causal Impacts of Water Infrastructure Failure","authors":"Jacob LaRiviere, Casey J. Wichman, Brandon Cunningham","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2851975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2851975","url":null,"abstract":"The causal economic impacts of water infrastructure disruptions in OECD countries are largely unknown. Using details of water main break events in Washington, DC, and hourly traffic speeds for 2,182 road segments in a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference design, we estimate the causal effect of main failure on congestion. We use k-means clustering to match treated road segments to control segments. Although precisely estimated, the magnitude of our treatment effects is economically small even when accounting for temporal traffic heterogeneity. Our results suggest that traffic concerns alone are not a justification for policy makers to alter repair strategy for distributed water infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123544724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Overview of Fisheries in Mahe District","authors":"V. Vasu, P. Devi","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2801694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2801694","url":null,"abstract":"Fisheries and aquaculture is the fastest growing and important sector of food production providing nutritional security to the food basket and engaging a teeming 14 millions of the population especially in the coast areas. Mahe is the smallest pocket of the union territory of Puducherry situated at 830 kms from its head quarters. The fisherfolk population constitutes of 2548 of whom 350 were traditional fishermen. As Mahe is situated on the south west coastal areas it is blessed with the locational advantage and has large potentialities of fish catch. The present study focuses on the overall picture of the fisherfolk in Mahe and the different modes of fishing operations in the traditional phase, mechanized phase, motorised phase and post motorised phase.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129904307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Markets, Contracts, and Uncertainty in a Groundwater Economy","authors":"X. Giné, Hanan G. Jacoby","doi":"10.1596/1813-9450-7694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-7694","url":null,"abstract":"Groundwater is a vital yet threatened resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts. The structural parameters are estimated using detailed micro-data on the area irrigated under each contract type combined with subjective probability distributions of borewell discharge elicited from a large sample of well-owners in southern India. The findings show that, while the contracting distortion leads to an average welfare loss of less than 2 percent and accounts for less than 50 percent of all transactions costs in groundwater markets, it has a sizeable impact on irrigated area, especially for small farmers. Uncertainty coupled with land fragmentation also attenuates the benefits of the water-saving technologies now being heavily promoted in India.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114444317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal Fishing Mortalities with Age-Structured Bioeconomic Model - A Case of NEA Mackerel","authors":"Yuanming Ni, S. Steinshamn","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2791493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2791493","url":null,"abstract":"The effects of random environmental impacts on optimal exploitation of a fish population are investigated using both optimization and simulation, based on a discrete-time age-structured bioeconomic model. The optimization problem is solved as a non-linear programming problem in GAMS. First, a basic model structure and 6 different scenarios, dealing with two interactions between fish and environment, are introduced. Based on the simplest scenario, eight different parameter combinations are tested. Then the optimization problem is solved for each of the 6 scenarios for a period of 100 years in order to gain long term insights. The main finding is that higher volatility from the environment leads to higher net profits but together with a lower probability of actually hitting the mean values. Simulations are conducted with different fixed fishing mortality levels under 6 scenarios. It seems that a constant fishing mortality around 0.06 is optimal. In the end, a comparison is made between historical and optimal harvest for a period of 40 years. It turns out that in more than 70% of the time, the optimal exploitation offered by our optimization model dominates the historical one, leading to 43% higher net profit and 34% lower fishing cost on average.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121587676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Water Abstraction License Regime in Italy: A Case for Reform?","authors":"Silvia Santato, J. Mysiak, C. Pérez-Blanco","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2771024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2771024","url":null,"abstract":"The current Water Abstraction License (WAL) regime in Italy is no longer flexible enough to cope with the challenges posed by human-induced climate and global environmental changes. The cornerstones of the current regime were laid down in the 1930s and have remained essentially unchanged ever since. The sole noteworthy reform of the Italian WAL regime was the decentralization of the regulatory competences from the state to the regional authorities in the late 1990s. In this paper, we review the WAL regimes across the administrative regions comprising the Po River Basin District (PRBD), the largest and economically most important in Italy. PRBD’s WAL regime includes a rigid and scattered WAL normative that hinders the performance of bottom-up conflict resolution mechanisms at a basin scale; a water pricing scheme that does not reflect the cost of water conveyance and use, and does not encourage efficient water allocation; and the lack of a central WAL register, which delays and in some cases impedes an environmental impact assessment for issuing new licenses or renewing existing ones, and does not allow prioritizing applications according to their full economic value. We argue these deficiencies may compromise both the integrity of riverine and water dependent ecosystems and the economic uses of water. This paper offers insights that can inform reform of water allocations in the PRBD and elsewhere in Italy and in Europe.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128899674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Works for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction? Evidence from the Corn Belt in the United States","authors":"Xiaojie Zhang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2767827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2767827","url":null,"abstract":"This paper joins the non-point source pollution regulation discussion and examines whether economic incentives provided by crop insurance subsidies alter fertilizer application decisions in the direction with environmental benefits. The model predicts that farmers regularly apply more fertilizer than optimal in a given year to take advantage of yield gains in the few years with favorable weather conditions, and that the long-term optimal fertilizer application level reduces with crop insurance, thus creating environmental externalities. Intuitively, farmers use “insurance application” of fertilizer at their own full expenses to achieve exceptional good yields and profits to make up for losses in bad years to sustain long-term profitability. With insurance covering the loss in very bad years, such incentive is reduced, resulting in a reduced the long-term optimal fertilizer level. Empirically, this study finds that a reduction in fertilizer use was achieved in the search of reducing systemic production risk in agriculture via crop insurance. An Instrumental variable (IV) approach was used taking advantage of the exogenous shocks on crop insurance enrollment induced by Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act (FCIRA) of 1994 and the differential response to the policy due to past extreme heat shocks. The study finds that counties in the Corn Belt where cropland is dominated by corn and soybean production showed an 18.5% decrease in commercial nitrogen (N) fertilizer use. No significant change in phosphorus (P) fertilizer application was found. The difference in behavior responses between N and P is expected and can be explained by the natural process of N and P in the soil and history of nutrients management in the Corn Belt. These findings suggest that public programs that alters economic incentives can have significant knock-on effects on agricultural non-point source pollution. Further, effective design of economic incentive programs in regulating agricultural NPS pollution should be rooted in understanding natural process of the pollutants in the ecosystem. More broadly, policy targeting the same population, regardless of the designed purpose of the programs, should be considered when predicting policy outcomes.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122857067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does Disclosure of Illegal Fishing Information Lead to Reduction of Seafood Sales? Measuring the Power of 'Market Instrument' for Compliance Promotion","authors":"Yuki Morita","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2766731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2766731","url":null,"abstract":"EU and the US have conducted sanction policy against those countries whose vessels have committed serious illegal fishing activities (IUU activities), by publicly identifying such countries as “IUU fishing nations”. This study evaluates the sanction policy’s impact size on the seafood export value of sanctioned IUU countries and its trend in terms of several angles, hypothesizing that sanction policy will reduce seafood export value from IUU countries through reputational loss in increasingly environmentally aware global markets. This study have revealed that information disclosure sanction does significantly reduce the raw seafood export value from sanctioned countries to the world by approximately 10-20% on average, being controlled with their export value of other foods (e.g. meat, rice, sugar) and time-variant fixed effects. However, the significant impact seems not to surface when looking at each market (EU15, US, other countries) individually. The impact was weaker and less significant on processed products than on raw seafood. These findings offer a new empirical evidence which supports the effectiveness of non-compliance information disclosure as a “market instrument” which could eliminate or reduce the sales of seafood products from non-compliant sources, under some limitations. It is expected that the findings of this study contribute to better informed decisions of global fisheries and environment managers on how to best promote environmental compliance.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128203881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Groundwater Governance Reforms: A Possible Licensing Framework for Groundwater Abstraction and Use","authors":"Constantinos Yiallourides","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2786726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2786726","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decades, incidents of extensive groundwater level decline, contamination of groundwater aquifers and extraction of poor quality water have become more intense. Both over exploitation and pollution of groundwater systems are largely a result of human activities on the surface. These may include agriculture, domestic and public use, industrial use, energy etc. All these economy sectors are inherently linked: they all vitally depend on groundwater but at the same time represent the most immediate threats to its sustainable management and conservation. That being the case, it is apparent that any governance system for the management and conservation of this valuable resource must walk a fine line in balancing competing or conflicting interests among stakeholders, and coordinating with urban and rural land uses and the management of the entire subsurface space.Against this background, the present paper critically explores possible types of groundwater governance reforms and provides an example of what a successful national framework for sustainable qualitative and quantitative groundwater abstraction and use might look like.","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128325190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Resource Efficiency: A Case Study in Carbon and Water Use","authors":"Daniel Ung, Kelly Tang, C. Weimann, Angela Olufunwa","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2744648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2744648","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, there has been increasing awareness around the issues related to climate change, and substantial amounts of money have been committed to tackle it. This includes undertakings to decarbonize institutional equity investments. Increasing the efficiency of the fossil fuels we already consume is undoubtedly an important focus. However, can we extend this approach to take into account how well we consume other resources (such as water) so that we can look at resource efficiency at large?","PeriodicalId":308822,"journal":{"name":"Water Sustainability eJournal","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114404377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}