Comparative Study on Water Management: Spain and California

Last week, Harvard's Widener Library sent me "La gestión del agua en España y California" by Pedro Arrojo and José Manuel Naredo (1997). The book has restored my faith in comparative studies, which often fall flat because they lack clear justification or piercing conclusions. Therfore I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pedro Arrojo successfully highlights water management practices in California that may be useful for water managers in Spain. For example, he points out that Californians have protected minimum instream flows for decades, they collect more granular data on water use, and have created an innovative water banking program to redistribute water rights.

Arrojo begins with the hard numbers and makes a case that California and Spain have a remarkably similar storage capacity and consumption patterns.

Without glorifying California's water policy, Arrojo points out that Spain lags in critical areas. At the time of his writing, Spain hardly discussed minimum instream flow protection, whereas Californians made considerable progress in protecting the minimum flows necessary to sustain the ecological integrity of the Sacramento Delta. These conclusions provide hope that significant improvements and efficiencies remain to be made within Spain's water management system.

And while Arrojo convices his reader that California's protection of minimum instream flow is the way of the future, he does not satisfactorily explain what conviced policy makers that this was good policy in the first place, or how this idea matured.

His chapter on groundwater revealed how little is known about aquifer abstraction. Private wells extract unknown volumes from aquifers. Of course, groundwater is a common resource, but it occured to me that groundwater does not have managment institutions to govern the commons as do other resources such as forests or fisheries. Are watershed committee's the response to this institutional deficiency? But don't groundwater users see themselves as in a different category than surface water users? How does watershed planning balance the needs of these two users? And can one manage the commons across a watershed if the form of extraction is so vastly different? While hydrological models can integrate ground water and surface water flows, how do management institutions facilitate this integration?

Finally, the book is now 11 years old, and some of the data is starting to become outdated. In Spain, much has changed since the rise and fall of the National Hydrologic Plan. Catalonia is in a drought, and improvements in desalination technology has changed the economic calculus. It may be time for a revision of his book and a reflection on some of the recommendations made. If Dr. Pedro Arrojo is looking for someone to help him update his book... tell me where I need to send my CV.

Gestio d'aigua a Catalunya

Podeu escoltar l'entrevista que en Joan Barril fa amb en Dr. Narcis Prat sobre la gestio de l'aigua a Catalunya en el programa El Cafe de la Republica. [Escolta l'entrevista] Es comenta la sequera, la re-utilitzacio, la contaminacio del Llobregat per les mines de potasi, els sistemes d'aigues grises, l'us d'aigua per regadiu i l'us urba.

Un punt de referencia interesant: Un hectometre cubic es aproximadament la cantitat d'aigua que hi cap en el Camp Nou.


I am posting an interesting interview of Dr. Narcis Prat who discusses water management in Catalonia. The interview is in Catalan.

Are some ecosystem services incorrectly calculated as avoided costs?

Valuing ecosystem services is messy business. A valuation exercise must first clarify the philosophical framework used. The ecosystem services described in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) clearly align with the anthropocentric and utilitarian philosophy adopted by mainstream economists (MA 2003). This philosophical origin is important for understanding the MA’s definition of ecosystem services. Recall that the MA defines ecosystem services as “the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems” (MA 2003). If ecosystem services are defined as benefits to people, then one must review how economists conceive of benefits.

Economists define benefits in terms of willingness to pay and consumer surplus. This description of benefits slightly diverges from everyday usage. As a result, users of the ecosystem services framework have attributed values to ecosystem functions that are misplaced. Proponents of ecosystem services frequently confuse avoided costs with benefits. The difference between these concepts is clear when one considers that the expenses associated with an infrastructure project are totally independent from the factors that determine willingness to pay or consumer surplus. Nevertheless, the confusion between avoided costs and benefits has persists.

The avoided cost method of valuation, if it can be considered a valuation method at all, estimates the value of an ecosystem service by calculating the cost of a human made substitute. The value of a wetland, for example, would be the cost of constructing and maintain a sewage treatment plant that performed similar services. This mistaken logic is even used in the well known example of drinking water in New York City. In the 1990s New York City water managers needed to improve the quality of its drinking water to meet new EPA standards. The initial proposal planned for the construction of a new filtration plant at the cost of USD $6 to $8 billion, plus $300 million per year in maintenance (Chichilnisky & Heal 1998, National Research Council 2000). But city officials found it cheaper to invest in the protection of the Catskill watershed at only a fraction of the cost. The intellectual inconsistency is to claim that the value of the ecosystem service was the avoided cost of constructing the filtration plant, or the difference between the planned expense and the watershed management plan. Such a claim incorrectly adds expected costs to the benefits ledger. There is no question that the watershed protection approach used by New York City officials was a win-win solution for land conservation and municipal finance. This criticism only clarifies what may fairly be considered a quantifiable benefit of an ecosystem function.

The hydrologic service of “water damage mitigation” cited by Kate Brauman and colleagues (2007) is another example that confounds benefits and avoided costs. Flood damage is a cost associated with land development. When homeowners pay to repair damage after a flood, they are paying a cost associated with living near a river or the cost of increased peak flows provoked by impervious surfaces upstream. If homeowners more pay more or less, these expenses should not influence the benefits associated with river protection. The distinction between costs and benefits are critical, and yet this distinction is confused by distinguished leaders in the field publishing in well respected journals (Brauman et al. 2007).

The confusion between benefits and avoided costs is perhaps the most common mistake in the current discussion on ecosystem services. However this distinction should be made clear to maintain consistency and improve academic rigor. This may result in reducing the “benefits” frequently attributed to ecosystem services. The danger in this confusion is that proponents of ecosystem services are inadvertently overstating the value of ecosystem services.