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In developed countries, water affordability problems remain up on the agenda as the increasing financial costs of water services can impede the realisation of an equal access to water. More than ever, public authorities that define water tariffs face the challenge of reconciling environmental and cost recovery objectives with equity and financial accessibility for all. Indicators of water affordability can be helpful in this regard. Conventional affordability indicators often rely on the actual amount that households spend on water use. In contrast, we propose a needs-based indicator that measures the risk of being unable to afford the amount of water necessary to fulfill essential needs, i.e. needs that should be fulfilled for adequate participation in society. In this paper we set forth the methodological choices inherent to constructing a needs-based affordability indicator. Using a micro-dataset on households in Flanders (Belgium), we compare its results with the outcomes of a more common actual expenses-indicator. The paper illustrates how the constructed needs-based indicator can complement existing affordability indicators, and its capacity to reveal important risk groups.

This paper considers the measurement of poverty in the European Union (EU). Starting from a definition of poverty that is suitable for the European context, a flexible measurement framework is proposed based on the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke class of poverty measures. Three key issues need to be addressed in the measurement of poverty. First, one has to determine the appropriate metric of individual well-being. Second, a cutoff value or threshold needs to be established under which persons are considered to be poor. Third, it is necessary to outline an aggregation procedure to attain a poverty figure for society as a whole. In what follows, we discuss the different answers that are implicit in the poverty measures applied in this book* and the EU's social strategy. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are introduced as the main data source for poverty analysis in the EU. Finally, an illustration is provided of how the different conceptual choices in the measurement of poverty affect the empirical findings regarding the evolution of poverty between 2005 and 2009. It turns out that the selection of individual well-being metric and the choice between a county-specific and a pan-European poverty line strongly affect observed patterns of poverty in the EU.

The association between the carbon footprint and the socio-economic characteristics of Belgian households

Municipal solid waste management systems of many developing countries are commonly constrained by factors such as limited financial resources and poor governance, making it a difficult proposition to break with complex, entrenched and unsustainable technologies and systems. This article highlights strategic partnerships as a way to affect a distributed agency among several sets of stakeholders to break so-called path dependencies, which occur when such unsustainable pathways arise, stabilize and become self-reinforcing over time. Experiences from a North-South collaborative effort provide some lessons in such partnership building: In Uganda and Denmark, respectively, the World Wildlife Fund and the network organization access2innovation have mobilized stakeholders around improving the municipal solid waste management system in Kasese District. Through a municipal solid waste management system characterization and mapping exercise, some emergent lessons and guiding principles in partnership building point to both pitfalls and opportunities for designing sustainable pathways. First, socio-technical lock-in effects in the municipal solid waste management system can stand in the way of partnerships based on introducing biogas or incineration technologies. However, opportunities in the municipal solid waste management system can exist within other areas, and synergies can be sought with interlinking systems, such as those represented with sanitation.