Hard and soft. Paths to 21st Century Water Management

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Position: Principal with The Cadmus Group, Inc., an environmental consulting firm
• Pages: 6-7

Page 6 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Jan./Feb. 2010

Managing Water Demand:

Price vs. Non-price Conserva-

tion Programs. A Pioneer Insti-

tute White Paper. Sheila M. Ol-

mstead and Robert N. Stavins.

Pioneer Institute Public Policy

Institute; 47 pages. 2007.

Making the Most of the

Water We Have: The Soft

Path Approach to Water Man-

agement. Edited by David B.

Brooks, Oliver M. Brandes and

Stephen Gurman. Earthscan;

272 pages: $79.95. 2009.

Sustainable Water Sys-

tems: Step One — Redening

The Nation’s Infrastructure

Challenge. A Repor t of the

Aspen Institute’s Dialogue On

Sustainable Water Infrastruc-

ture In The U.S. David Mons-

ma, Regan Nelson and Ray

Bolger. The Aspen Institute; 36

pages. 2009.

One could be forgiven for imag-

ining a contemporary revi-

sion of Shakespeare’s famous

line “let’s kill all the lawyers,” and

substituting in their place water and

wastewater engineers.

Today, there is increasing concern for

protecting aquatic ecosystems as well as

human health and the economy, great-

er attention to nonstr uctural as well

as structural solutions, more emphasis

on demand-side as well as supply-side

management techniques, and a grow-

ing sense that we are simply feeding the

elephant in the room. at is, we have

an expensive legacy infrastructure very

much akin to the mainframes which

were up-ended by the rise of

personal computers.

ese legacy systems are

not adequately supported by

municipal politicians who

would rather have a root ca-

nal than raise water rates to

a level necessary to maintain

their utilities’ infrastructure

for its entire life cycle, includ-

ing replacement costs. By al-

most every measure available,

the United States has the low-

est water and wastewater rates

of any developed nation. No

wonder there is so much angst about an

infrastructure investment “gap” in our

water sector.

Of course, engineers are extremely

important to the ef‌fective management

of water systems. Even green solutions

or low-impact development techniques

that seek to emulate natural processes

of retention, f‌iltration, and evapotrans-

piration in urban settings demand care-

ful design, siting, and scaling to be ef-

fective.

Yet, more and more landscape archi-

tects, biologists, foresters, and econo-

mists are having their say as traditional

engineered approaches no longer meet

our environmental, economic, and so-

cial needs. Indeed, the best and bright-

est of the engineering profession recog-

nize the cr ucial role of an integrated,

interdisciplinary approach that aims to

protect the watershed as well as main-

tain hard infrastructure; adopts prac-

tices which mimic nature; engages in

robust civic education to communicate

the importance of full-value, full-cost,

and conservation pricing; and begs, ca-

joles, and often compels customers to

use water-ef‌f‌icient f‌ixtures and drought-

resistant plantings.

“Water management has typically

been approached as an engineering

problem, rather than an economic

one,” say Robert N. Stavins, a Kennedy

School environmental economics pro-

fessor, and Sheila M. Olmstead of Yale

and Resources for the Future.

In their white paper for the Massa-

chusetts-based Pioneer Institute, Man-

aging Water Demand: Price vs. Non-

Price Conservation Programs, they argue

that water supply managers are “often

reluctant to use price increases as water

conservation tools, instead relying on

non-price demand management tech-

niques.” ese would include actions

such as requiring low-f‌low f‌ixtures and

restricting particular uses, which, while

good things in and of themselves, are

not as cost-ef‌fective as “using prices to

manage water demand.”

Olmstead and Stavins review the lit-

erature on water pricing and the myster-

ies of price elasticity. eir conclusion?

“On average, in the United States, a 10

percent increase in the marginal price of

water can be expected to diminish de-

mand in the urban residential sector by

about 3 to 4 percent,” say the authors.

“Price elasticity of residential water de-

mand is similar to that of residential

electricity and gasoline demand in the

United States.”

Olmstead and Stavins highlight a

key limitation of non-price approaches.

Water savings are usually smaller than

expected due to “behavioral responses”;

i.e., customers taking longer showers

with low-f‌low shower heads, f‌lushing

twice with low-f‌low toilets, or water-

ing lawns longer under day-of-the week

or time-of-day restrictions. ey cite a

recent study of 12 American

and Canadian cities which

suggested that replacing two-

day-per-week outdoor water-

ing restrictions with drought

pricing could achieve the

same level of aggregate water

savings, “along with welfare

gains of approximately $81

per household per summer

drought.” Low-income cus-

tomers can be helped through

rebate programs “inversely

related to household income,

or some other measure.”

e movement away from an exclu-

sive reliance on supply-side solutions

and toward demand-side management

techniques, such as pricing, non-pricing

or hybrid programs, is very desirable.

However, Canadian proponents of the

“water soft path,” or WSP, believe an

even more radical approach is required,

one that places ecosystem integrity at

the heart of water management and

governance.

David B. Brooks, Oliver M. Brandes

and Stephen Gurman, editors of Mak-

ing the Most of the Water We Have:

e Soft Path Approach to Water Man-

HARD AND SOFT

Paths to 21st Century Water Management

By G. Tracy Mehan III

in T h e li T e r a T u r e