Andrew Ayres

Abstract: Ever since the 2002 Bundestag resolution “Sustainable water management in Germany”, benchmarking has become one of the most important instruments for the modernization of the German water services sector. Meanwhile, the discussion about the level of water prices continues unabated. The decision of the German Federal Court of Justice from 2 February 2010 has made it clear that competition law can also be applied to water suppliers, and they can thus be expected to provide a justification for excessive water prices. Accordingly, the pressure on drinking water providers to reduce costs has risen dramatically. At the same time, there is consensus among the German states as well as within the water industry that increased efficiency should not come at the expense of pre-emptive measures to protect water bodies and human health. This study therefore investigates the importance ascribed to the actions taken by water providers to ensure the protection of water bodies and human hea...

In western North America, wildfire is a critical component of many ecosystems and a natural hazard that can result in catastrophic losses of human lives and property. Billions of dollars are spent suppressing wildfires each year. In the past decades, academic research has made substantial contributions to the understanding of fire and its interaction with climate and land management. Most reviews of the academic literature, however, are centered in either natural or social science. We offer an integrated cross-disciplinary guide to state-of-the art fire science and use this review to identify research gaps. We focus on the modern era and understanding fire in the context of a changing climate in western North America. We find that studies combining social and natural science perspectives remain limited and that interactions among coupled system components are poorly understood. For example, while natural science studies have identified how fuel treatments alter fire regimes, few social science studies examine how decisions are made about fuel treatments and how these decisions respond to changes in fire regimes. A key challenge is to better quantify the effects of actual fire management policies in a way that accounts for the complexity of coupled natural and natural–human system interactions.

ion charges are in place in some EU Member States. They target households and industry. The agriculture sector often benefits from lower rates (ECOTEC, in ACTeon, 2009), and abstraction charges are nearly ubiquitous in the countries assessed in this study. In most cases, volumetric charging is applied. In the absence of metering systems, fixed charges per hectare are imposed. Exemptions from abstraction charges and taxes are common. Examples of exemption are regions or water bodies with a positive water balance and small water • Slovenia: — Rules of tariff system for public service on the environmental field (Pravilnik o metodologiji za oblikovanje cen storitev obveznih občinskih gospodarskih javnih služb varstva okolja, Official Gazette no. 63/2009, 87/2012). — Filippini, M. et al. (2010): Productivity growth and price regulation of Slovenian water; Zbornik radova Ekonomski fakultet Rijeka, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 89–112 (see http://amala.rero.ch/record/20112). — Filippini, M., Hrovati...

Groundwater is a prime example of a common-pool resource subject to over-extraction and rent dissipation under open access. To avoid this, users can assign groundwater rights: a cap is set on the volume of groundwater that can be pumped annually, and rights are allocated among users. Although this process restricts pumping, it also improves long-term resource availability, grants a fungible asset that can be traded, and reduces uncertainty for urban developers. We investigate the effect on land values by exploiting a plausibly exogenous discontinuity in the definition of rights in the Mojave groundwater basin in California. Because both the long-term stream of agricultural rents and the value of tradable permits are capitalized into land value, spatial regression discontinuity designs identify the difference between the value of interior parcels with water rights and those of free riders on the exterior, who can drain from the regulated area with no restrictions. We find that the va...

Environmental markets are widely prescribed as an alternative to open access regimes for natural resources. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design that exploits a spatially incomplete market for groundwater rights recovers a lower bound on the market’s net benefit. We apply this estimator to a major aquifer in water-scarce southern California and find that a groundwater market generated substantial net benefits, as capitalized in land values. Heterogeneity analyses point to gains arising in part from rights trading, enabling more efficient water use across sectors. Additional findings suggest that the market increased groundwater levels.

As surface water becomes scarcer and precipitation more variable in a warmer climate, reliance on groundwater reserves for agricultural use is expected to increase. Where efforts to achieve sustainable groundwater management require reductions in aggregate extraction, some of these reductions will entail a decline in agricultural production. However, the degree to which water conservation and other environmental priorities conflict with agricultural production depends, in part, on the spatial configuration of land-use decisions. We explore how to spatially configure groundwater recharge projects to achieve groundwater recharge targets and preserve ecologically important habitat at the least cost. We conduct a field-level analysis for all fields in Kern County, California, the largest crop-producing county in California (and the United States). Results demonstrate that fields selected for cost-effective land retirement can achieve groundwater recharge targets and simultaneously contribute to biodiversity goals via endangered species habitat conservation. However, increasing the amount of habitat conserved raises costs significantly. We discuss conservation actions, economic incentives, and policies that can be leveraged to meet regional biodiversity goals while preserving the economic vitality of agricultural communities. More broadly, this work also provides a proof-of-concept for applying the conservation planning tool, Marxan, to promote efficient allocation of land uses in the face of increasing water resource scarcity and biodiversity threats.