Measuring benefits of rural-to-urban water transfer

School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Hangzhou, China
school of economics and management, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Davis college of agriculture, natural resource and design, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27131v1
Subject Areas
Ecosystem Science, Natural Resource Management
Keywords
Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), Keyword: Rural-to-urban water transfer, Production Function Approach (PFA)
Copyright
© 2018 Wang et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Wang J, Ma Y, Collins A. 2018. Measuring benefits of rural-to-urban water transfer. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27131v1

Abstract

Agriculture-to-urban water transfer is currently an important measure to meet the increasing water demand result from rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. Not only measuring benefits of agriculture-to-urban water transfer is critical to assess water transfer proposals, but also it can provide reliable basis for redistributing the benefits of agriculture-to-urban water transfer. This paper has developed a comprehensive framework in which Production Function Approach (PFA) is applied to quantify the value of water use in agricultural and industrial sectors, and Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) is employed to investigate the value of water use in municipal consumption and ecological environment. A case study from Zhuji in China verified the feasibility and validity of the method proposed in the paper. Results indicate that the Agriculture-to-urban water transfer increases the water value created by improving allocation efficiency of water use in different sectors. The benefits of agriculture-to-urban water transfer mainly origin from the fact that the economic value in industrial water-use are higher than which in the other sectors’ water-use. Meanwhile, the urban residents have a stronger desire to improve the water eco-environment which lead to higher water value in urban area.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

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