Water Supply & Land Use in The Books Store

• Examines the critical link between water management and international trade, considering how local water depletion and pollution are often closely tied to the structure of the global economy
  
• Offers a consumer-based indicator of each nation’s water use: the water footprint
  
• Questions whether trade can enhance global water use efficiency, or whether it simply shifts the environmental burden to a distant location
  
• Highlights the hidden link between national consumption and the use of water resources across the globe, identifying the threats facing ‘water dependent’ countries worldwide
  
• Provides a state-of-the-art review and in-depth data source for a new field of knowledge

The Essential Handbook of Ground-Water Sampling clearly details the economic and scientific case for adopting these new methodologies. Citing examples of unnecessary expenditure due to the inaccuracy of out-dated techniques, the editors point out that the expense of making incorrect decisions based on poor quality samples clearly negates any savings that might be realized by using older, more inefficient, and effectively short-sighted, methods. Using numerous figures, tables, and references to recent research, the editors explain the efficiency of utilizing newer, more accurate, techniques that produce higher quality data. The text provides a detailed discussion of every aspect of ground-water sampling from the development of a sampling and analysis plan, through sample collection, pretreatment, handling, shipping, and analysis, to the documentation, interpretation, and presentation of ground-water quality data.

In the next ten minutes, forty children around the world will have died because they didn't have enough clean water or sanitation facilities.

In the world today, over a billion people lack safe drinking water. As tension mounts between states competing for diminished supplies of "blue gold," the global water industry is expected to become a trillion-dollar-a-year operation within a decade.

Water provides benefits as a commodity for agriculture, industry, and households -- and as a public good for scenic values, waste assimilation, wildlife habitats, and recreational use. However, even as the nature and needs of economies change, water continues to be allocated to other than high priority uses, water quality continues to decline, environmental uses get inadequate attention, and floods and droughts take an unnecessarily severe toll. One reason for this is that price signals that reflect scarcities of goods and thereby guide investments and resource allocation in the private sector are usually distorted or absent in decision-making relating to water. To aid in cost-benefit analysis under conditions where appropriate price incentives are absent, economists have developed a range of alternative or "non-market"methods for measuring economic benefits.

Robert Young aims to provide the most comprehensive exposition to-date of the application of nonmarket economic valuation methods to proposed water resources investments and policies. He provides a conceptual framework for valuation of both commodity and public good uses of water, addressing valuation techniques appropriate to measuring public benefits -- including water quality improvement, recreation and wildlife habitat enhancement, and flood risk reduction. However, in contrast to the existing environmental valuation literature, the emphasis here is on the commodity uses of water by agriculture, industries, and households. The discussion describes the various measurement methods, illustrates how they are applied in practice, and discusses their strengths, limitations, and appropriate roles.