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Drought and dwindling supplies coupled with a growingpopulation are severely straining California's waterresources, and traditional water supply planning andanalysis are proving inadequate to help the state prepare forfuture needs. To help ascertain the value of urban water use inCalifornia, one alternative has been the development of economicloss functions, which represent a flexible yet rigorousmethod to replace yield, shortage, and requirements-basedapproaches to assessing water supply performance for planningstudies, regulatory impact assessments, and other evaluations.The approach in this article applied residential water demandelasticities for residential willingness-to-pay for water, used anindustry study for industrial willingness-to-pay for water, andassumed fixed commercial sector water use for 2020 populationlevels. On the basis of economic loss functions described in thisarticle, urban water scarcity in California in 2020 would costend users an estimated average of $1.6 billion per year, givencurrent operations, allocations, and infrastructure. Includes 28 references, tables, figures.

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Edition: Vol. 95 - No. 2 Published: 02/01/2003 Number of Pages: 13File Size: 1 file , 910 KB