Freshwater is our planet's most precious resource — essential for life itself. Despite this fact, many people across our planet face difficulties finding safe, clean, potable water. A U.S. State Department report contends that the world's thirst for water may become a human security crisis by 2040. The World Bank reports many developing nations face catastrophe from intensive irrigation, urbanization, and deteriorating infrastructure. Also, numerous reports contend that in many places un-treated wastewater is still released directly into the environment. This is particularly true in low-income countries, which on average treat less than 10% of their wastewater discharges.In short, we face three imminent challenges regarding freshwater: (1) demands by agriculture, cities, industry, and energy production are increasing; (2) severe pollution from various contaminants and growing withdrawals are limiting the capacity of waterways to dilute contaminants — threatening human and aquatic life; and, (3) climate change will cause periods of frequent and severe droughts — punctuated by acute periods of flooding.The goal of this book is to illuminate how the governance of freshwater is a political, social, economic, cultural, and ecological challenge. The management and provision of water are not merely technical problems whose resolution hinges on hydrological principle, cost, or engineering feasibility. They are products of decisions made by governments, businesses, and interest groups that exercise control over who has access to water, how they use it, and in what condition they receive it. It discusses basic knowledge about water supply and quality; the evolution of water policy in different societies; the importance of water to human and environmental health; the role of law, politics, and markets in its allocation, use, and protection; and, the importance of ethics in its equitable provision.

Globalization and recent developments in the world suggest strong relationships between local and global decisions, actions and impacts. Global-local relationships are also associated with positive and negative externalities, which necessitate policy interventions.Lecture Notes in Global-Local Policy Interactions discusses the process of building and managing a global public policy and the interaction of public policies at the global and local (national/regional) levels. This book demonstrates the global negative externalities from under-regulation of various activities by one agent/country that affect the well-being of other agents/countries, and the design of policies (agreements) to reduce the impacts of such externalities. Possible opposed interests to global policies of local stakeholders and the (local) policies they established to tackle such externalities in their jurisdictions are included as well.The book introduces concepts and principles associated with conflict, negotiation and cooperation, all of which are part of policy reform and design. It explores to various extents the global-local interactions that are related to selected global policies. Special emphasis is placed on global policies such as climate change, water, anti-terrorism, tobacco control, regulation of substances that deplete the ozone layer, desertification, and elimination of anti-personnel mines.

People pursue their own interests, whatever those interests might be. Some people have interests that are narrow and selfish, while others have interests that are broad and altruistic. The idea that people are self-interested underpins all of economic analysis and raises two fundamental questions: 1. How do people choose the actions they think will further their own interests? 2. Can the potentially conflicting interests of different people be made to 'mesh' in some sort of socio-economic equilibrium? This book is devoted to a detailed study of the first question. Its Companion Volume (Economy-Wide Microeconomics: Equilibrium, Optimality, Applications and Tests) makes a detailed study of the second question.Following some foundational remarks, this book studies the Arrow-Debreu theory of consumer choice. That theory supposes people choose so as to maximize a complete, continuous, transitive, and reflexive binary preference relation over a non-empty and compact choice set. The book then studies numerous refinements, generalizations and extensions of each of these restrictions — up to and including recent work on Behavioral theories of choice and choice behaviour when preferences are intransitive/incomplete/discontinuous. Also considered is choice behaviour in environments that are not necessarily compact. A study is also made of intertemporal choice and choice under uncertainty. The study of Arrow-Debreu choice theory and its extensions are presented from the Primal, Dual, and Revealed Preference points of view.Consumers are not the only agents in the economy, as Producers are present as well. Beginning with a study of the Arrow-Debreu idea that producers choose from a convex production set so as to maximize profit, the book considers extensions and generalizations of this framework, particularly to non-convex environments. The study is presented from the Primal and Dual points of view.The final chapter in the book provides a link to its Companion Volume. The Chapter indicates how the theories of consumer and producer choice studied here help inform answers of the second question posed above.Resources are available to instructors who adopt this book. More details at www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12789-sm

The most interesting issues in environmental and resource economics have an explicit temporal dimension, since variables of interest such as pollutants, greenhouse gases, biomass of biological resources, or the stocks of fossil fuels accumulate in the ambient environment or are depleted through human actions and natural processes.The purpose of these lectures is to present the mathematical tools for analyzing environmental and resource management issues in a dynamic set-up.The lectures include a brief description of differential equations and then move on to describe methods of optimal control, dynamic programing, and differential games. The final chapters cover two novel topics: (1) environmental issues characterized by deep uncertainty, and aversion to ambiguity using robust control methods and formulations of precautionary policies; and (2) the study of pollution/resource management in space and time when the environmental variables evolve in time and diffuse in space.The lectures are a valuable tool for advanced graduate students in environmental and resource economics who are studying dynamic problems.

Population growth and rising living standards, on the one hand, and changing climate, on the other hand, have exacerbated water scarcity worldwide. To address this problem, policymakers need to take a wide view of the water economy – a complex structure involving environmental, social, economic, legal, and institutional aspects. A coherent water policy must look at the water economy as a whole and apply a comprehensive approach to policy interventions. Written by two of the world's leading scholars on economics of water, this is the first graduate-level textbook on the topic. The book discusses water resource management within a comprehensive framework that integrates the different, yet highly entwined, elements of a water economy. It follows the steps needed to develop a well-designed set of policies based on detailed analyses of intervention measures, using multi-sectoral and economy-wide examples from a variety of locations and situations around the world.

This book, based on lectures on natural and environmental resource economics, offers a nontechnical exposition of the modern theory of sustainability in the presence of resource scarcity. It applies an alternative take on environmental economics, focusing on the economics of the natural environment, including development, computation, and potential empirical importance of the concept of option value, as opposed to the standard treatment of the economics of pollution control. The approach throughout is primarily conceptual and theoretical, though empirical estimation and results are sometimes noted. Mathematics, ranging from elementary calculus to more formal dynamic optimization, is used, especially in the early chapters on the optimal management of exhaustible and renewable resources, but results are always given an economic interpretation. Diagrams and numerical examples are also used extensively. The first chapter introduces the classical economists as the first resource economists, in their discussion of the implications of a limited natural resource base (agricultural land) for the evolution of the wider economy. A later chapter returns to the same concerns, along with others stimulated by the energy and environmental “crises” of the 1970s and beyond. One section considers alternative measures of resource scarcity and empirical findings on their behavior over time. Another introduces the modern concept of sustainability with an intuitive development of the analytics. A chapter on the dynamics of environmental management motivates the concept of option value, shows how to compute it, then demonstrates its importance in an illustrative empirical example. The closing chapter, on climate change, first projects future changes and potential catastrophic impacts, then discusses the policy relevance of both option value and discounting for the very long run. This book is intended for resource and environmental economists and can be read by interested graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the field as well.

Climate change (CC) is currently an unquestionable phenomenon. If not stopped, it will be catastrophic for life on earth. Scientific evidence shows that human activities are the primary driver of CC tendencies since the industrial times. In this book, we present the relationship between development and CC, with special reference to agriculture, the rural sector, and policies aimed to promote sustainable development. We also give special attention to the situation in low- and medium-income countries particularly rural households and small farmers in these countries.The study of agriculture, CC, and sustainability requires consideration of natural resources and their uses (land, freshwater, forests, etc.), as well as the rural sector since land for agricultural production often expands at the expense of forests. In addition, the use of water for agricultural production affects the availability of this resource for other uses in the urban, industrial, and service sectors. Consequently, sustainable agricultural development under CC requires an interdisciplinary or at least a multidisciplinary approach. In this book, we do our best to deal with this challenge by focusing on issues and topics related to agriculture and its use of natural resources in the context of CC, but without ignoring the interrelations of these phenomena with further aspects of sustainability beyond agriculture.

Water scarcity due to climate change, population growth, and economic development is a critical issue in many semi-arid and arid regions around the world. Water scarcity is especially critical in regions where water is shared by several riparian states and used for competing purposes (irrigation, domestic, industry, environment, and hydropower). There is evidence that water scarcity may give rise to conflicts among the riparian states that share water basins. At the same time, there is evidence that proper arrangements among riparian states create a basis for cooperation, which is a necessary condition for economic development, food production, environmental sustainability, and poverty reduction. This book presents a collection of work presented by a group of academics and policy experts dealing with the impact of water scarcity and variability on the ability to jointly manage shared water and the derived welfare of international states and nations sharing international river basins, consisting of economics, technology, law and institutions, geography, and international relations.The book covers theoretical aspects of management of transboundary water as well as case studies from hotspots around the world. The unique aspect of this book is the multidisciplinary nature of the chapters, reflecting a new field of research that will gain popularity as water scarcity will increase over time and across regions.The chapters from the book were presented at the 'Management of Transboundary Water Resources under Scarcity: Perspectives on Agriculture and Food Security' workshop held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, from June 22 to 23, 2015.

Data on water quality and other environmental issues are being collected at an ever-increasing rate. In the past, however, the techniques used by scientists to interpret this data have not progressed as quickly. This is a book of modern statistical methods for analysis of practical problems in water quality and water resources.The last fifteen years have seen major advances in the fields of exploratory data analysis (EDA) and robust statistical methods. The 'real-life' characteristics of environmental data tend to drive analysis towards the use of these methods. These advances are presented in a practical and relevant format. Alternate methods are compared, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each as applied to environmental data. Techniques for trend analysis and dealing with water below the detection limit are topics covered, which are of great interest to consultants in water-quality and hydrology, scientists in state, provincial and federal water resources, and geological survey agencies.The practising water resources scientist will find the worked examples using actual field data from case studies of environmental problems, of real value. Exercises at the end of each chapter enable the mechanics of the methodological process to be fully understood, with data sets included on diskette for easy use. The result is a book that is both up-to-date and immediately relevant to ongoing work in the environmental and water sciences.

People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but significantly more for producing things such as food, paper and cotton clothes. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. Indirect use refers to the 'virtual water' embedded in tradable goods and commodities, such as cereals, sugar or cotton. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business. This book offers a complete and up-to-date overview of the global standard on water footprint assessment as developed by the Water Footprint Network. More specifically it: o Provides a comprehensive set of methods for water footprint assessment o Shows how water footprints can be calculated for individual processes and products, as well as for consumers, nations and businesses o Contains detailed worked examples of how to calculate green, blue and grey water footprints o Describes how to assess the sustainability of the aggregated water footprint within a river basin or the water footprint of a specific product o Includes an extensive library of possible measures that can contribute to water footprint reduction