This paper explores the welfare costs associated with drought plan transactions between a public municipal water agency, the El Dorado Irrigation District (EID) in California in the USA and its customers. The EID imposes a tiered pricing plan for municipal customers, which was analyzed as a discrete continuous choice (DCC) model by water users within a climate driven water evaluation and planning (WEAP) model of the EID water system.

This paper analyses the underlying factors affecting people’s satisfaction with drinking water provided by community-based organizations in rural Costa Rica. These organizations provide water to more than 60% of the country’s rural population, but there is great disparity in the quality of water provided.

Using a Generalized Ordered Logit regression and data from 41 villages, we studied how characteristics of the water supply infrastructure, the governance structure, and the attributes of local people affect consumers’ perception of water quality at home.

By signing a water sharing agreement (WSA), countries agree to release an amount of river water in exchange for a negotiated compensation. We examine the vulnerability of such agreements to reduced water flows. Among all WSAs that are acceptable to riparian countries, we find out the one which is self-enforced under the most severe drought scenarios. The so-called upstream incremental WSA assigns to each country its marginal contribution to its followers in the river.

With increasing water scarcity and competing uses and users, water use efficiency is becoming increasingly important in many parts of developing countries. The lake Naivasha basin has an array of different water users and uses ranging from large scale export market agriculture, urban domestic water users to small holder farmers. The small scale farmers are located in the upper catchment areas and form the bulk of the users in terms of area and population. This study used farm household data to explore the overall technical efficiency, irrigation water use efficiency and establish the factors influencing water use efficiency among small scale farmers in the Lake Naivasha basin in Kenya.

Groundwater pumping can reduce the flow of surface water in nearby streams. In the United States, recent awareness of this externality has led to intra- and inter-state conflict and rapidly-changing water management policies and institutions.

This study uses household survey data from four Kenyan towns to examine the effect of households’ characteristics and risk perceptions on their decision to treat/filter water as well as their choice of main drinking water source.

Why are some communities effective at providing safe drinking water, while others fail?

The new fertilizer subsidies in sub-Saharan Africa are intended to increase agricultural production and ensure development of a fertilizer market. Fertilizer adoption requires complementary inputs, such as investment in soil and water conservation (SWC), for efficient and optimal nutrient uptake, and many fertilizer subsidy programs implicitly assume that fertilizer subsidies crowd in such investments.

This paper explores how analytical hydrologic models can inform the effective design and choice of policy instruments to manage groundwater quality by coupling a social-planner’s problem of optimal groundwater-quality management with analytical solutions from the hydrology literature.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that water and sanitation improvements and other preventive health interventions are always a wise economic investment. Costs and benefits are presented for six water, sanitation, and health programs—handwashing, sanitation, point-of-use filtration and chlorination, insecticide-treated bed nets, and cholera vaccination. Model parameters are specified for a range of conditions that are plausible for locations in developing countries.