Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Water and Climate Change: Research paper

Although not on my active academic research agenda I suspect this will be an inceasingly "hot topic". It is good to see work being done in this area. Some broader based empirical work would be interesting.

Climate Change and Water Resources – An International Perspective
Date: 2007-01
By: Marianne Keudel

URL: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/klniwpdip/dp02_2F07.htm
Climate change and its consequences are the focus of many environmental policies in the European Union but also in other countries. Whereas in the US marketable instruments like permit trading have already been implemented since the 1980s, the EU first implemented permit trading for CO2 emissions in 2005. Climate change also influences the availability of water resources; water levels of rivers in the EU are assumed to decrease in the next decades. Decreasing water levels, in turn, heavily influence the quality of these water resources. In some countries the instrument of permit trading is also applied to the regulation of water resources (quantity and quality). This paper gives an overview of existing systems in order to show how such trading systems can create incentives for the efficient use of resources by means of pricing.
Keywords: river basin management, water trading, water quality trading
JEL: Q25 Q53

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