[1] We present the first assessment of willingness to pay (WTP) for water supply change to be conducted in the largest city in the developing world: Mexico City. Two large sample contingent valuation surveys are conducted to investigate WTP for two levels of water service quality: maintenance of or improvement over current provision levels. This study design permits one of the first tests of the ''scope sensitivity'' of WTP responses to different levels of baseline supply provision. This testing is complicated within the present case because as our study confirms, higher-income households typically enjoy better levels of current provision, while poorer households generally endure lower current standards of water supply. We incorporate this heterogeneity of service and correlation with income within a suite of novel scope sensitivity tests. These confirm prior expectations that richer households enjoying higher baseline service levels would prefer programs to maintain the status quo, while poorer households enduring lower initial quality of service would prefer schemes which improve the quality of supplies. The implications of these findings are further investigated by contrasting conventional benefit-cost analysis aggregation procedures with an equity weighting approach which confirms the difference in priorities according to initial supply conditions. In this case, the ranking of programs changes when the ability to pay is equalized across society. In fiscal terms, aggregate WTP figures show that authorities could collect the resources necessary to fund households' preferred schemes and simultaneously substantially reduce current subsidies.Citation: Soto Montes de Oca, G., and I. J. Bateman (2006), Scope sensitivity in households' willingness to pay for maintained and improved water supplies in a developing world urban area: Investigating the influence of baseline supply quality and income distribution upon stated preferences in Mexico City, Water Resour. Res., 42, W07421,
Understanding how to adapt to increasing risk under climate change is essential for governments wishing to mitigate harms and manage insurance and disaster assistance costs. An approach that values the public good of hazard mitigation provisioned by natural ecosystems could also incentivise government, beneficiaries and insurance companies to share responsibility and funding for targeted conservation and restoration. To illuminate this concept of the insurance value of ecosystems, it is important to map the relationship between the area(s) that benefit from and provide regulating ecosystem services and to identify what determines the level of protection. In the case of flood control regulation that benefits at-risk urban areas, upstream or inland peri-urban areas are key.We present steps to operationalise the insurance value in policy using spatial indicators of periurban biodiversity and vegetation and soil health for four Mexican cities. For Mexico City only, we identify at-risk areas and characterise upstream peri-urban areas and find this insurance value is already diminished. Combining spatial analysis with a damage cost function we estimate the expected damage costs of different flood events and the monetary value of enhancing this insurance value. This estimate could be compared to other policy interventions and integrated into hazard insurance.
On analysing data from a Contingent Valuation (CV) survey to restore the Atoyac River Basin in Puebla, Mexico, we found that households obtain differentiated benefits due to their condition of closeness to or distance from the river, which are in turn often associated with conditions of vulnerability to water pollution and poverty. Our approach was to estimate Willingness to Pay (WTP) for restoration of the Atoyac River that crosses the Puebla State, using models for two population groups: those residing nearby and those living farther away. As 2019, Instituto Mexicano de Tecnolog铆a del Agua Open Access bajo la licencia CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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