Joseph Cook

Streamflow augmentation can support endangered fish during low‐flow periods. Irrigated agriculture being the largest out‐of‐stream consumptive use, there is potential to augment streamflow by temporarily leasing from agriculture. This potential has not been fully realized, perhaps due to a focus on leasing at the extensive margin where land is either irrigated or not. Leasing at the intensive‐margin—applying less water on the full land extent—has received limited attention but could be promising, especially related to short‐term pulse flows for fish. We address this with two questions: Can a concurrent short‐term pause of irrigation withdrawals meaningfully increase streamflow for fish during critical periods? What is the associated foregone crop production and revenue loss? We used the CropSyst model to simulate irrigation demands, yield impacts from a 15‐day pause, and resulting revenue reductions for three focal watersheds in eastern Washington State of the United States, and generated water supply curves that provide the marginal cost of augmentation. We evaluated the strategy's ability to bring flows to levels beneficial for fish for at least two consecutive days. Results indicate that a short‐term irrigation pause can provide meaningful levels of pulse‐flows if conducive conditions related to upstream crop mix, acreage, and augmentation needs are met. The mean cost from lost revenue across years from reduced yields ranged from $1 to $125/acre in scenarios where the targeted streamflow was achieved. This water leasing strategy has potential in some locations to represent a win‐win situation for agricultural and environmental stakeholders and warrants further exploration.

Providing piped water and sewer services is extremely capital intensive, yet most of this infrastructure is buried, hidden from citizens and ratepayers. Roman emperors built elaborate public fountains to increase the salience of massive infrastructure investments to the public, yet modern households give scarce thought to the water network that serves them. At the same time, tariffs are often too low to recover operations and maintenance costs, let alone capital replacement and system expansion. We use a field experiment to investigate whether providing 353 households in Nairobi, Kenya with information about the water infrastructure that serves them changes their perceptions of water and sewer bills. Compared to a control group, we find that providing households verbal and visual information (in person) about the capital intensity of water service delivery in Nairobi increased their perceptions of “fair” water bills by 15%–24% above the control mean of 404 KSH/mo.

The tire byproduct 6PPD-quinone is lethal to several salmonid species when it is washed off roads into waterways. We study private consumer demand for a hypothetical, reformulated “Salmon Safe” tire with an online survey of n=695 vehicle owners in California, Oregon, and Washington. Using a pre-registered study design, we also test whether consumers comprehend information differently when the science component of the survey is presented as narrated video or static text and images, and whether forcing consumers to deliberate for 45 – 60 seconds affects their decision and choice certainty. We find that the median respondent would be willing to pay approximately 10% more, or $76, for a set of four reformulated tires, though approximately 25% of subjects were willing to pay $225 or more. Information presentation and forced deliberation had no effect on willingness to pay for reformulated tires or comprehension, but weak (and negative) effects on choice certainty.

Many cities provide incentives for private landowners to install green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) to reduce stormwater runoff and deliver co-benefits of urban greening. We analyze how participation in a GSI subsidy program affects the spatial distribution of urban greening. The distributional effects manifest in two stages: program eligibility and participation decisions. Eligibility, determined by hydrological factors, is positively correlated with wealthier and whiter areas. Within eligible areas, the wealthiest households and least white neighborhoods have lower participation rates. The findings highlight the importance of considering eligibility and participation in balancing the joint goals of environmental quality and environmental justice.

We calculate the first distributional statistics for municipal water use with 14.9 million monthly billing records for a half million households in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2014 to 2018. These years span a historic drought and a multi‐faceted package of conservation programs that achieved a 50% citywide drop in consumption. We find that the top 10% of households consumed 31% of water before the drought, with the Gini coefficient showing clear seasonal peaks driven by outdoor water use. Matching billing records to fine‐grained census data from 2011, we find that the correlation between income and water use in the winter was 0.08 but rose to 0.36 during outdoor watering seasons. This correlation declines before switching signs by the end of the drought. The city's increasing block tariff implied that the top 10% of users generate 50%–60% of utility revenues. Although before the drought these top users were more likely to be high income, the composition of top water users changed during the drought. Average income of top users during the drought was 35% lower than the average income of top users before the drought. Our results suggest that Cape Town's policy of providing a free allowance of 10.5 kL (m³) per month to qualify indigent households helped protect many, but not all, from multiple steep tariff increases.

Over a dozen studies have examined how households who travel to collect water (about one-quarter of humanity) make choices about where and how much to collect. There is little evidence, however, that these studies have informed rural water supply planning in anything but a qualitative way. In this paper, we describe a new web-based decision support tool that planners or community members can use to simulate scenarios such as (1) price, quality, or placement changes of existing sources, (2) the closure of an existing source, or (3) the addition of a new source. We describe the analytical structure of the model and then demonstrate its possibilities using data from a recent study in rural Meru County, Kenya. We discuss some limits of the current model, and encourage readers and practitioners to explore it and suggest ways in which it could be improved or used most effectively.