Centre for Environmental Management and Decision Support

A study aimed at identifying barriers for more efficient water management was carried out on the Yongding river basin (the Yongding being a tributary of the Hai river) in northern China. The basin suffers from severe water scarcity, whereby agricultural water demand is the largest water user with about 66% of the total demand. The study identified two main policy problems: inadequate use of efficient irrigation technologies and a far too low agricultural water price. The study elaborated on policy instruments that could be used to overcome these two policy problems and assessed them using the Planning-Oriented Sustainability Assessment Framework (Starkl et al., 2013), which applies a novel application of the analytical hierarchy process to assess and interpret the individual preferences of interviewed stakeholders based on their experiences with the policy instruments. Respondents agreed that all the considered policy instruments can be implemented. Indeed, most of them are already implemented somewhere in China. However, respondents expect that high levels of effort are needed. For, while policy makers are perceived to accept these instruments, the public in rural communities may not be ready for change. Thus, the promotion of water saving technology appears likely to gain more public support than increased water prices.

The paper reports on the methodology and findings of a recent project on behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management. The Ministry is seeking procedures for combining ecological and economic criteria to assess which technical urban water alternatives shall receive funding. To this end the current decision making process (DMP) for implementing urban water alternatives in Austria has been analyzed and compared with the situation elsewhere, e.g. in Sweden. The DMP entails specific requirements on assessment, whence the most common decision aid methodologies, ranging from LCA-based to multi-criteria methods, have been described and evaluated from an environmental, economic, legal and practical point of view, turning out recommendations to the Ministry. Their main points are: First the DMP should be kept as simple as possible in order to make it transparent. Second the aggregation of different criteria groups should and can be avoided. Therefore the stakeholders should not be allowed to make trade-offs. Finally clear objectives need to be stated.