SiriusXM Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School recently had a segment on the Cape Town water crisis. Host Don Loney of the Knowledge@Wharton show discussed the current situation in Cape Town and what it tells us about the future of water in a changing climate with guests Carolyn Kousky of the Wharton Risk Center, Kevin Winter of the Unive
Martine Visser talks about Cape Town's water saving measures on a local radio station.
When people are called upon to rally around a “public good” such as conserving water, they are more likely to do so if they believe they are working together to achieve a common goal. Despite the finger-pointing and appearance of panic in drought-stricken Cape Town, citizens in this apparently divided city are showing unprecedented levels of co-operation.
The Cape Town Water Map is an innovative and somewhat controversial behavior‐modification tool implemented to reduce water use in a drought‐stricken region.
We use a series of framed experimental games to test the role of access to credit and insurance on farm technology uptake with small-scale farmers in South Africa. Using Cumulative Prospect Theory ‘CPT’, we assess how insurance impacts technology uptake given risk preferences. Our findings suggest that risk aversion is linked to lower uptake of the uninsured and insured technology, while loss averse farmers are more likely to adopt technology bundled with insurance.
Faced with the threat of “Day Zero”, when it was feared that Cape Town's taps could run dry, consumers reduced household water usage from 540 to 280 L per household per day over the 36 months between January 2015 and January 2018. This paper describes the events that prompted this reduction. We look at how changes in water use were affected by official announcements and by public engagement with this news via the social media activity and internet searches. We analysed the water usage of a subset of middle to high income households where smart hot and cold water meters were installed.
It is commonly asserted that the successful management of common property resources (CPR), and by extension, the provision of public goods such as biodiversity and carbon, requires the devolution of control to local communities. However, where trust in community institutions is low, the intrinsic motivation to co-operate may be diminished. In this study, we carried out surveys and framed field experiments on the introduction of payments for ecosystem services (PES) to Namibia’s communal conservancies, established under the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programme.
Deforestation and burning of forest products to meet cooking need massively contribute to global warming. In order to reduce the biomass fuel consumption of households in developing countries, various improved cookstove (ICS) interventions were implemented by governments, NGOs, and other stakeholders in the past decades. This paper synthesizes the impact evaluation literature on the adoption and impact of ICS, and their role in improving household welfare while reducing the pressure on forest resources and mitigating the emission of CO2.
The shrimp industry plays a leading role in aquaculture development in Vietnam. Currently, the government is running a credit subsidy program to support farmers investing in improved production methods. This paper aimed to investigate white-legged shrimp farmers’ willingness to invest in improved production methods and to examine whether the current government policy for the sector is in line with farmers’ preferences using a discrete choice experiment.