Water shortage and contamination; waste water and sanitation
Agriculture has historically been the single largest user of fresh water resources. If limited in its temporal and spatial availability, water has at the same time been the most important obstacle to agricultural development. Water is a pivotal input to plant production and animal husbandry. Surface and subsurface water bodies are also important sinks for a number of agricultural wastes including organic manure, mineral fertilizers and pesticides. The local manifestations of the water cycle are a key determinant for a complex system of micro-climatic conditions faced by agricultural production.
Today a multitude of additional social and economic activities depend directly or indirectly on the reliable availability of water. Accordingly, water resources are used for numerous industrial purposes, such as in the cooling of combustion engines or as a solvent in chemical processes. Water further serves as a source for drinking, cooking, recreation and the removal and treatment of human wastes. This overall trend is catalyzed by global population growth and the rapid economic development of major transition countries such as China, India and Brazil.
As in agriculture also most other types of water use tend to rely on the resource’s capacity to simultaneously serve as a source and a sink. Differences, however, exist in terms of the qualities and quantities they require. Furthermore, water is frequently demanded at very different times and locations. The finiteness and the physical mobility of water add up to the problem by resulting in numerous complex interactions between water users across space and time. Water has consequentially become the object of increasing coordination problems and competition.
The theoretical concepts developed by the Division of Resource Economics serve to further extend our analytic capacities for examining existing systems of rules and actors that take part in today’s struggle over water. The quest to analyze how nature-related institutions evolve, how they interact with other sets of social rules and how those institutions determine the allocation of costs and benefits from water use, represents a pivotal step towards facilitating the increasingly important need for coordination of water related conflicts.