Economic assessment of water storage for adaptation to climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Stefanos Xenarios and Matthew McCartney

Conference Papers from International Water Management Institute

Abstract: The development of water storage schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa is considered a major aid for agricultural regions with scarce water and anticipated climate change impacts. The selection of storage options is often conducted through monetary assessment of direct costs and benefits. Such an approach, although prompt and straightforward, often leads to reductionism in the assessment process and loss of valuable information. This in turn can result in less than optimal decision-making. Against this background, this paper proposes an alternative approach based on an outranking methodology designed with threshold systems and weighting values. Though based on the underlying principle of economic efficiency, the approach proposed avoids some crucial weaknesses of cost-benefit related analyses. The methodology has been evaluated to six case studies in Ethiopia and Ghana through the introduction of socioeconomic and environmental related indicators.

Keywords: Water; storage; Climate; change; Decision; making; Cost; benefit; analysis; Case; studies; Economic; aspects; Assessment; Environmental; effects; Indicators; Surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iwmi.org/pdf/H044343.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iwt:conppr:h044343

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Conference Papers from International Water Management Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chandima Gunadasa ().