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Category: Water Quantity & Adaptation

Behavior, Environment, and Health in Developing Countries: evaluation and valuation

Published January 1, 2009 by Alex Pfaff
Subhrendu Pattanayak, Alexander Pfaff
Annual Review of Resource Economics (2009) 1:183–217

PDF link iconWe consider health and environmental quality in developing countries, where limited resources constrain behaviors that combat enormously burdensome health challenges. We focus on four huge challenges that are preventable (i.e., are resolved in rich countries). We distinguish them as special cases in a general model of household behavior, which is critical and depends on risk information. Simply informing households may achieve a lot in the simplest challenge (groundwater arsenic); yet, for the three infectious situations discussed (respiratory, diarrhea, and malaria), community coordination and public provision may also be necessary. More generally, social interactions may justify additional policies. For each situation, we discuss the valuation of private spillovers (i.e., externalities) and evaluation of public policies to reduce environmental risks and spillovers. Finally, we reflect on open questions in our model and knowledge gaps in the empirical literature including the challenges of scaling up and climate change.

 

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Climate, Stream Flow Prediction and Water Management in Northeast Brazil: societal trends and forecast value

Published January 1, 2007 by Alex Pfaff
Kenneth Broad, Alexander Pfaff, Renzo Taddei, Sankar Arumugam, Upmanu Lall, Francisco Assis de Souza Filho
Climatic Change (2007) 84:217–239

PDF link iconWe assess the potential benefits from innovative forecasts of the stream flows that replenish reservoirs in the semi-arid state of Ceará, Brazil. Such forecasts have many potential applications. In Ceará, they matter for both water-allocation and participatory-governance issues that echo global debates. Our qualitative analysis, based upon extensive fieldwork with farmers, agencies, politicians and other key actors in the water sector, stresses that forecast value changes as a society shifts. In the case of Ceará, current constraints on the use of these forecasts are likely to be reduced by shifts in water demand, water allocation in the agricultural Jaguaribe Valley, participatory processes for water allocation between this valley and the capital city of Fortaleza, and risk perception. Such changes in the water sector can also have major distributional impacts.

 

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Effective & Equitable Dissemination of Seasonal-to-Interannual Climate Forecasts: policy implications from the Peruvian fishery during El Nino 1997-98

Published January 1, 2002 by Alex Pfaff
Kenneth Broad, Alexander Pfaff, Michael. H. Glantz
Climatic Change 54: 415–438, 2002

PDF link iconThe development of seasonal-to-interannual climate predictions has spurred widespread claims that the dissemination of such forecasts will yield benefits for society. Based on the use as well as non-use of forecasts in the Peruvian fishery during the 1997–98 El Niño event, we identify: (1) potential constraints on the realization of benefits, such as limited access to and understanding of information, and unintended reactions; (2) the need for an appropriately detailed definition of societal benefit, considering whose welfare counts as a benefit among groups such as labor, industry, consumers, citizens of different regions, and future generations. We argue that consideration of who benefits, and an understanding of potential socioeconomic constraints and how they might be addressed, should be brought to bear on forecast dissemination choices. We conclude with examples of relevant dissemination choices made using this process.

 

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Generating Probabilities in Support of Societal Decision Making: the case of abrupt climate change

Published January 1, 2001 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Dorothy M. Peteet
EOS (American Geophysical Union), May 15 2001

PDF link iconEarth-science predictions of natural phenomena are increasingly seen as valuable aids to improved societal decision making. Pielke et al. recently (EOS 7/13/99) argued persuasively that good predictions alone won’t achieve better societal decisions. These authors’ call to change the decision environments in which scientific predictions are used, though, may be more relevant to the daily activities of policy makers than to those of scientists. We see a role also for changing the information that scientists feed into those decision environments. In particular, scientists could better serve societal needs by generating not only possible scenarios, but also improved probabilities that decision makers need, including for decisions to be taken in the near future.

 

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Who benefits from seasonal-to-interannual climate forecasts?

Published January 1, 1999 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Kenneth Broad, Michael H. Glantz
NATURE|VOL 397 | 25 FEBRUARY 1999

PDF link iconThe effective and equitable dissemination of climate forecasts is as important and challenging as their accuracy. During El Niño 1997–98, Peruvian fisheries showed the need to understand forecast use and all parties’ interests.

 

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