As I mentioned in my introductory post, I hope you’ll pay particular attention to interventions where Rafe and I agree something should be done. Whenever such agreement emerges, we plan on letting you know. Hopefully, we’ll inspire you to support them as well. As it happens, we have just identified such an intervention, WaterAid. I stumbled across this worthy cause while researching a slightly different problem. What follows is the long version of the story. Please bear with me; it sets the stage for future posts.

As you may remember from this post, I am an Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) skeptic. I wasn’t always this way; it was only after I’d started trying to research the highest cost-benefit ratio interventions that I became disillusioned with both the scientific evidence that AGW will be a significant contributor to climatic change and the expected reliability of predicting potential AGW effects on human welfare.*

Of course, when Rafe and I discussed my conclusions, he said something like, “Well, essentially you’re saying that the climate is a really variable complex system and we can’t forecast its behavior very well. It follows that climate change will happen and some of it will be bad. People will suffer. So what should we do about that?” Unsurprisingly given the focus of this blog, my answer was that we should invest in adaptation…

… bringing me back to my original problem of determining the highest cost-benefit ratio interventions, albeit starting from a somewhat different set of requirements. It didn’t take long for me to identify water as the top priority: you need it for a lot of things, ensuring an on-demand supply is difficult, and you die pretty quickly without it. Now, it turns out that a little Googling for data and analysis with Excel revealed that there is actually sufficient fresh water on the planet Earth to support everyone in a roughly first world lifestyle.

The problems are location, infrastructure, and allocation, which could potentially be solved by transport, investment, and markets respectively–all economic issues. Thus began my quest to understand water economics. I’m really just getting up the learning curve and the topic is rather complex (you might even say that it is a “complex system”). I’ll probably have several posts summarizing what I learn. Initially, I’ve found three good places to start if you are econo-literate:

  • A book chapter by Hanemann from UC Berkley that is a good overview water economics.
  • A PhD thesis by Zetland from UC Davis that illustrates water economics with a California case study.
  • Aguanomics, Zetland’s blog. (Note that he’s a little more interventionist on carbon than I)

The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is to be very, very wary of big water projects. There is a lot of opportunity for them to create a cascade of perverse incentives that mess up water usage for decades. Read Zetland’s thesis if you want gory details.

Unfortunately, this lesson creates a bit of a quandary if you’re looking for useful interventions. You can’t just throw big dollars at the problem. So when Zetland posted about WaterAid on Aguanomics, I was quite pleased. First, his endorsement carries significant weight with me. Second, I really liked what I saw when I went to their Web site. They’re focused on modest, local projects and really adapt their water delivery strategy to local conditions. Most importantly, it looks like they get good bang for the buck.

Obviously, WaterAid doesn’t solve the problem of how the entire world will adapt to changing water conditions over large timescales. But it does address the issue of how to improve access to water for the poor today. This is a good thing in and of itself. It should also help us learn what sort of future adaptations will work best for poor regions–the ones who will most likely bear the greatest burden of changing water conditions.

* Before your flame me, two points. First, I won’t engage in any general AGW debate in the comments of this post. If you want to discuss the topic with me, submit a comment with a valid email address (remember, any information in the email address field when you post is supposed to be visible only to blog contributors) that says something like, “Please contact me to discuss AGW.” I’ll send you email to initiate the conversation. Second, I spent hundred of hours of research going through the primary literature before I came to these conclusions. So don’t think you’re simply going to snow me with a bunch of assertions and references to lay sources. You’ll have to get into some serious scientific discussion.

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  2. How Much Water Does it Take to…?
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  4. Even Assuming Global Warming, We Shouldn't Worry?
  5. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"