Earth Observation for Water Resource Management in Africa

Overview and summary Economic instruments, such as water tariffs or pollution charges, are an important complement to technical, regulatory, and institutional tools to achieve a sustainable and efficient management of wastewater. Economic instruments use market-based, mostly monetary, measures with the objective to raise revenue to help finance wastewater services, to provide incentives to use water efficiently and carefully, to provide disincentives for the anti-social release of polluted wastewater, to make the polluter pay for the environmental damage done, and to raise awareness on the environmental and societal costs of water use and wastewater discharge. The most common economic instruments used in wastewater management are the pricing of wastewater services and levying of charges for wastewater discharge into the environment. In this lesson, different economic instruments used in wastewater management will be presented. Special emphasis will be given to the various tariff structures that are used to levy wastewater service fees. Tariffs determine the level of revenues that service providers receive from users. They are designed for different purposes, and often contain some elements to address poverty.

Introduction The increasing scarcity of water in the world coupled with rapid population growth, particularly in urban areas, is an ever more concerning phenomenon and gives rise to the need for appropriate integrated water resources management practices. Water supply, sanitation and water management are recognised as global concerns and have become a part of the Millennium Objectives. The Heads of State and Government convened at the United Nations 2000 meeting committed –upon adopting the Millennium Objectives– to reduce by half the proportion of world population without access to drinking water or basic sanitation services, and to do so by the year 2015. Water is of vital importance to development. The water and sanitation deficit in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region is a major cause for concern. The LAC region possesses 30 percent of the world’s water resources; however, large segments of the population live in areas where water –when it exists– is either scarce or polluted. In addition, the distribution of population with respect to these water resources is highly irregular or inequitable. At present, despite the fact that 86 percent of the region’s population has access to a source of drinking water, only 49 percent has access to sanitation services (Looker, 1998). In the LAC region’s large urban centres, the lack of appropriate sanitation services has resulted in tremendous health problems for the poorest population. It is estimated that close to 150 of the nearly 510 million inhabitants of the region do not have access to any safe source of water at all, and nearly 250 million do not receive sewerage services (Looker, 1998). Many Caribbean islands have a low availability of water, and some of the more populated areas are very limited in this resource. For this reason desalinizing plants have played an important role in some countries such as Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas and Barbados. In the cities of the LAC region 13 percent of the population has no access to sanitation services, whereas 7 percent has no access to a source of drinking water. The lack of access to a safe source of water and to sanitation services, together with high population density, generates immense public health problems. In developing nations – where less than 10 percent of wastewater is treated– diarrhoea is one of the primary causes of infant mortality, showing disproportionately high rates in the poor population of these countries. Vector-related disease, such as malaria, also increases in sites containing stagnant wastewater (Looker, 1998).