The Economic Value of Water: Providing Confidence and Context to FEMA’s Methodology

Committee Report: Update on residuals management for low‐pressure membrane filtration

“…Such incidents have major costs to both the economy and all facets of the community; reasonable estimates range at least from $103 to $220 per person per day, plus the intangible costs for delivery and distribution of alternate sources of water (Aubuchon & Morley 2013). The potential disruption to the affected communities should not be considered lightly or built on a questionable foundation.…”

Hydrological risk transfer planning under the drought \"severity-duration-frequency\" approach as a climate change impact mitigation strategy

“…Later in the vulnerability module, the water deficit (for droughts) or the affected assets per water level (for floods) are estimated. Afterwards, the economic loss is quantified per sector independently as a function of the hazard level, from damage functions pre-established in each case (see Machado et al 2005 for Brazilian situations or Aubuchon & Morley 2013). Thus, the losses are linked to the return period "Rp" and a loss function in monetary value "$ls" is obtained.…”

“…One equation is the annual value of production per volumetric demand, resulting in a fixed ratio in monetary value (dollars per unit volume), thus establishing a relationship between the deficit and economic losses. For example, for the domestic sector, we used the formulation from Aubuchon & Morley (2013), a modified method proposed by , (Eq.…”

“…Where rs is the resilience of sector s to the lack of water, αs is the dependence of sector s to the water source (surface water in this case), and zs is the percentage of water supply for the sector (0 for the complete outage, 1 for normal supply). The resilience varies from sector to sector of activity with an average value adopted from Aubuchon & Morley (2013)…”

The economic consequences of water utility disruptions

“…Some studies have estimated the cost of household service interruption losses due to water disruptions using constant elasticity demand curves to obtain willingness to pay measures to avoid water supply disruptions (Harrington et al, 1991;Bay Area Economic Forum, 2002;Brozovic et al, 2007;Aubuchon & Morley, 2012). A complementary approach has been used to obtain estimates of averting behavior and other household expenditures during water contamination events (Harrington et al, 1991;Abdalla et al, 1992;Collins & Steinback, 1993;Laughland et al, 1993;Livernois, 2001).…”