[1] Water resources will face increasing competition and higher environmental concerns during this century. To meet these challenges, the new Water Framework Directive has drawn up an integrated framework and established the basic principles for a sustainable water policy in the European Union. The introduction of water prices reflecting the true cost of irrigation is one of its most innovative components. In this paper, a positive mathematical programming model is developed to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of water pricing policies in Spanish irrigated lands. The model interface allows friendly use and easy replication in a large number of irrigation districts, selected throughout the Spanish territory. The model results show the impact on environmental indicators, water consumption, cropping patterns, technology adoption, labor, farmers' income, and the water agency revenues when different scenarios of cost recovery are considered. It is argued that this modeling approach may be used as a management tool to assist in the implementation of the cost recovery approach of the new Water Framework Directive.Citation: Iglesias, E., and M. Blanco (2008), New directions in water resources management: The role of water pricing policies, Water Resour. Res., 44, W06417,
This paper focuses on the economic consequences of droughts for the irrigation sector. We develop a dynamic-recursive mathematical programming farm model that assumes imperfect mobility of capital and labour as well as rational expectations about future water availability. The model is calibrated to 12 representative farms belonging to three irrigation communities of the Guadalquivir Basin (south Spain) and used to simulate the 1991-1997 period, which included 3 years of intense drought. Results indicate that the drought imposed significant costs on farmers, but show also that water managers partly exacerbated these costs by allocating excessive amounts of water to irrigators in the abundant years. The model is also used to evaluate the benefits of a perfect water supply forecast and to simulate the economic gains of a voluntary water banking scheme. Results show that the benefits resulting from the perfect forecast of water supply 1 year ahead would represent a relative gain of 5%. However, a voluntary banking system would allow farmers to increase their benefits by 32-82% depending on the supply system.
The steady decline of birds living in cereal steppe lands is a worrying situation that the European Common Agricultural Policy is attempting to remedy through the application of agri‐environmental schemes (AES). We assess farmers' preferences towards these AES, which call for a number of environmental practices to protect birds. Using a face‐to‐face survey in farming communities in Aragón (Spain), and through the estimation of an Ordered Logit model (OL), we assess the ranking of AES attributes, and obtain their economic valuation according to the farmers' preferences. We find that social factors are also important in determining farmers' decisions. In particular, the importance of social trust and expectation of compliance by other neighbours, encourage farmers to sign up to AES. These and other results may be used to design more effective AES and help to solve this important biodiversity problem.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.