Mapping incentives for sustainable water use: global potential, local pathways

Join the Oxford Water Network and Oxford Hydrology Group for this exciting webinar!

We welcome Charles Wight and Dustin Garrick for a discussion on incentives based approaches to water scarcity.

Abstract:
Competition for freshwater resources is intensifying water scarcity and its impacts on people, economies and the environment, posing a growing challenge for sustainable development. Demand-side solutions like water markets and other incentive-based approaches have a history of documented potential yet have fallen short on delivering. In this seminar, we present preliminary results from our study which identifies where, and which types of incentives-based approaches can be used to deliver different kinds of benefits to people and nature. We undertake a multi-scale assessment of two classes of incentives – water transactions and public investments in irrigation water use efficiency (i.e. subsidies). We combine hydrologic models with data on agricultural production and urban to rural competition to produce a global spatially explicit model. Our model identifies (a) the priority areas for incentive-based management, and (b) which types of incentives are possible in those priority geographies and their potential public and private benefits for agricultural, urban and environmental water uses. These results indicate that incentives can play an important role for water managers and policy leaders for achieving SDG goals based on their local contexts.

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