ABSTRACTABSTRACTOver-allocation of water resources to irrigation, industry, and cities has severely impacted flow-dependent riverine ecosystems and led to growing interest in ways to restore water to the environment; one increasingly popular approach is water buybacks. This paper reviews US and Australian experiences in buying back water, focusing on the conditions which enable and inhibit environmental water acquisitions in each country. We also compare experiences with buyback efforts in fisheries, another natural resource sector. Lessons from these experiences provide important insights into how future water buyback programmes to acquire environmental water could be operated more effectively. The review suggests that the overall success of an environmental water buyback is likely to be enhanced by (1) legal and institutional settings which clearly define water rights and lower administrative and other barriers to water transfers, (2) non-governmental organizations and community groups which play a complementary role to government, (3) creation of a system that will fairly distribute future risk of water availability and provide choices for a variety of ways of obtaining water, and (4) efforts that minimize negative community impacts, thus helping to maximize irrigator participation.KEY WORDS: Buybacksenvironmental waterinstream flowsMurray–Darling basinwestern USAwater marketsfisheries AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to acknowledge Peter Söderbaum and two anonymous reviewers, whose helpful comments improved this paper. This research was funded by grants from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the Lois Roth Foundation, which enabled the lead author to spend a year researching in Australia. The research was also supported by a George Perkins Marsh Conservation Fellowship from Vermont Law School and an Australian Research Council linkage grant with partner organizations including the MDBA, Goulburn-Murray Water, NSW Department of Energy and Office of Water, Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, CSIRO, and University of Lethbridge, Canada.
This article explores the issue of multiple externalities through a case study of irrigated agricultural production in eastern Oregon. A mathematical programming model is used to demonstrate the manner in which a policy directed at one externality (soil erosion) may influence the incidence of another externality (groundwater pollution). A key determinant of multiple externality outcomes is interdependence in the processes producing agricultural commodities and externalities. Potential benefits from coordinating a policy to address multiple environmental objectives are discussed.
Abstract Biological sources of carbon sequestration such as revegetation have been highlighted as important avenues to combat climate change and meet global targets by the global community including the Paris Climate Agreement. However, current and projected carbon prices present a considerable barrier to broad‐scale adoption of tree planting as a key mitigation strategy. One avenue to provide additional economic and environmental incentives to encourage wider adoption of revegetation is the bundling or stacking of additional co‐beneficial ecosystem services that can be realized from tree planting. Using the World's largest land‐based carbon credit trading scheme, the Australian Emissions Reduction Scheme (ERF), we examine the potential for three pairs of ecosystem services, where the carbon sequestration value of land use change is paired with an additional co‐benefit with strong prospects for local tangible benefits to land owners/providers. Two cases consider agricultural provisioning values that can be realized by the landowners in higher returns: increased pollination services and reduced lamb mortality. The third case examined payments for tree plantings along riparian buffers, with payments to farmers by a water utility who realizes the benefit from reduced treatment cost due to water quality improvements. Economic incentives from these co‐benefit case studies were found to be mixed, with avoided treatment costs from water quality paired with carbon payments the most promising, while pollination and reduced lamb mortality paired with carbon payments were unable to bridge the economic gap except under the most optimistic assumptions. We conclude that the economics case for significant land use change are likely to be geographically dispersed and only viable in relatively niche landscape positions in high establishment, high opportunity cost areas even when carbon payments are augmented with the value of co‐benefits classified as providing direct and local benefits.
Abstract Irrigation is one pillar of the Green Revolution that drove dramatic agricultural productivity gains across Asia. In Bangladesh, irrigation uptake has been so significant that 97% of dry‐season rice is now irrigated. While most Bangladesh monsoon rice is completely rainfed, supplementary irrigation is sometimes employed where late monsoon onset is potentially yield‐limiting. Station‐controlled experiments provide a narrative of positive yield benefits from supplementary irrigation. In contrast, statistical evaluations of actual farm experience mostly show no yield benefit and lower profitability for supplementary irrigation adopters. To add evidence on this controversial practice, we evaluated data from 2012 and 2015 Bangladesh farm household surveys with causality econometric approaches that control for differences between supplementary irrigation adopter and non‐adopter groups. After controlling for self‐selection and endogeneity, we found no statistically significant yield benefit for supplementary irrigation. Our results support scepticism about the profitability of supplementary irrigation. As such, we recommend careful consideration of the mixed evidence on effectiveness in future supplementary irrigation project benefit cost analyses. Further evidence over a longer time and accounting for a broader range of crops is also important moving forward.
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