Valuing Water, Valuing Livelihoods: Guidance on Social Cost-benefit Analysis of Drinking-water Interventions, with Special Reference to Small Community Water Supplies

Abstract

The editors-John Cameron, Paul Hunter, Paul Jagals and Katherine Pond-wish to express their appreciation to all those whose efforts have made the production of this book possible. The Consortium plus an international group of experts met in Farnham, United Kingdom in February 2007 to discuss the issues and the book structure was developed from this meeting. Subsequently, editorial meetings were held in South Africa in August 2007 and in Geneva in February 2008. The quality of the volume as a whole is due in large part to the review and comments provided by many individuals. Intellectual inputs and review by the following individuals

Assessing the value of resource recovery and reuse: social, environmental and economic costs and benefits for value creation and human well-being

“…CEA is essentially a simplified version of CBA: both analyses result in a single figure for comparison, but CEA avoids the need to estimate use or non-use values of intangible or public goods. However, by only measuring the cost-effectiveness according to the primary objective of minimizing costs, CEA may neglect to show that an alternative achieves poorly on one or more secondary objectives (Cameron et al 2011).…”

“…This technique should include the opportunity costs of the time lost due to an illness, taking the human capital approach and using labor market prices to value changes in health status (Renwick and Monroe 2006). For example, in a study on the health benefits of clean energy, sanitation and drinking water interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa these were valued at between USD 80 to 126 year -1 for each household impacted by the intervention (Cameron et al 2011). Other social costs and benefit indicators associated with changes to public health status include reduced morbidity and mortality, the calculated total time savings from a reduction from a certain illness, the total time savings for the alternative to the intervention and overall savings on health care (Cameron et al 2011).…”

Water and health interlinkages of the sustainable development goals in remote Indigenous Australia

“…While the targets have been agreed to be "aspirational and global", with each government free to set national targets appropriate to its circumstances, the 232 agreed indicators for the SDGs are very clear to assist reporting and accountability. SDG 6 was proposed to the UN as a specific goal in acknowledgement that access to clean, safely managed water, sanitation, and hygiene are key interventions for primary health prevention and could reduce the global disease burden by almost ten per cent 20,21 . This is likely to have a flow-on effect on educational attainment, public health costs, and economic productivity 14 , with WASH investments calculated as providing seven-to-one benefits to costs for health outcomes 22 .…”

A methodology to assess vulnerability in small communities drinking water systems

“…A large percentage of the population relies on small drinking water systems (SDWS) for their basic needs. Drinking water systems in small communities have been the subject of many publications in the past (WAGNER;LANOIX, 1959;SAUNDERS;WARFORD, 1976;HOFKES, 1983), and continue to this date (CAMERON et al, 2011;OXENFORD;BARRETT, 2016;IWA, 2017). Small systems differ from those of larger cities with respect to management, infrastructure, technology and operation.…”