Climate Change and the Willingness to Pay to Reduce Ecological and Health Risks from Wastewater Flooding in Urban Centers and the Environment

Marcella Veronesi, Fabienne Chawla (), Max Maurer () and Judit Lienert ()
Additional contact information
Fabienne Chawla: Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
Max Maurer: Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
Judit Lienert: Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology

No 01/2013, Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics

Abstract: Climate change scenarios predict an increase of extreme rain events, which will increase the risk of wastewater flooding and of missing legal water quality targets. This study elicits the willingness to pay to reduce ecological and health risks from combined sewer overflows in rivers and lakes, and wastewater flooding of residential and commercial zones under the uncertainty of climate change. We implement a discrete choice experiment on a large representative sample of the Swiss population. Swiss households strongly value the protection of water bodies, and mostly, the avoidance of high ecological risks and health risks for children related to combined sewer overflows in rivers and lakes. Our findings also show that climate change perception has a significant effect on the willingness to pay to reduce these risks. These results are important to support policy makers’ decisions on how to deal with emerging risks of climate change in the water sector and where to set priorities.

Keywords: choice experiment; climate change; ecological risk; health risk; wastewater (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D81 I10 Q25 Q51 Q54 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2013-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Ecological Economics 98, February 2014: 1-10.

Downloads: (external link)
http://dse.univr.it/home/workingpapers/wp2013n1.pdf First version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Climate change and the willingness to pay to reduce ecological and health risks from wastewater flooding in urban centers and the environment (2014)
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:ver:wpaper:01/2013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Reiter ().