Climate Change and Texas Water Planning: an Economic Analysis of Inter-basin Water Transfers

Yongxia Cai and Bruce McCarl

No 49933, 2009 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, 2009, Milwaukee, Wisconsin from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Panel models with random effects are used to estimate how climate influences in-stream surface water supply, municipal water demand, crop yields and irrigation water use. The results are added into TEXRIVERSIM, a state wide economic, hydrological, environmental and inter-basin water transfer (IBTs) investment model, through the objective function and hydrological constraints. A climate change related scenario analysis from the Global Circulation Models (GCMs)--Hadley, Canadian, BCCR and NCAR with SRES scenarios A1B, B1, and A2 indicates that inter-basin water transfers not only greatly relax water scarcity problems for major cities and industrial counties, but also create growth opportunity for Houston. However, while destination basins receive the benefits, source basins will experience dramatic reduction in in-stream flow and water flows to bays and estuaries. Climate change requires accelerated water development with more IBTs proving economically feasible depending on the GCMs and SRES scenarios.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/49933/files/AAEA_Cai.pdf (application/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:ags:aaea09:49933

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.49933

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, 2009, Milwaukee, Wisconsin from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().