Question

1) Based on your understanding of the topic of water pricing and demand: 1. Briefly, discuss why water should have a price. 2. What is the relationship between price and demand? 3. You have different water demands as follow (industrial, agricultural, drinking, washing clothes, cooking, car wash). Discuss the elasticity of demand and order these demands based on the concept of elasticity and rigidity. 4. Discuss how the population growth affects the water demand.

2) You are requested by a consultancy office to participate in preparing a water demand management plan for a city with a total population of 750,000. Discuss in details the main points that you will take it in your consideration as well as the main components of this plan.

Answer 1

Answer 1)

Since drinking water is a human right, it is agreeable that the base amount a person needs to survive, about 15 gallons a day, should be subsidized. However, It's the issue of water for swimming pools, lawns, and agriculture that's tricky and politically thorny.Today, less than 1% of the world’s water is fresh and accessible, so new technologies that expand usable freshwater sources could be transformative.But all the technologies only point to efficiency, recycling, reuse, and desalination as important currently existing options. Since we don’t have a replacement for water, we have to focus on the scarcity side of the picture.Besides, the traditional ways of solving water-shortage problems, diverting water from rivers and pumping groundwater to increase supply, have their own environmental consequences. The drought's cost to agriculture has been estimated to be high as a bomb.The long-term solution can only be to build a “circular” water economy, in which water, a non-renewable resource, returns to the system to be used again and again.

As water is becoming more and more scarce, the sane option of keeping it at a price can help the wastage and limited use of the irreplaceable resource.

Answer 2)

The price and demand are directly proportional to each other. As demand increases, price increases and vice versa. The relationship of price and demand is also dependent on an indirect factor called supply. Based on supply, the proportion of price increase is decided based on increase in demand.

Answer 3)

Elasticity refers to the degree of responsiveness in supply or demand in relation to changes in price. If a curve is more elastic, then small changes in price will cause large changes in quantity consumed. If a curve is less elastic i.e rigid, then it will take large changes in price to effect a change in quantity consumed.

The order of these demands starting from elasticity to rigidity is as below-

1. Industrial
2. Agricultural
3. Washing clothes
4. Drinking
5. Car washing
6. Cooking

Answer 4)

Urbanization, defined as the increasing share of a nation’s population living in urban areas and, thus, a declining share living in rural areas, is one of the most extreme forms of human-induced land use change resulting from the intricate actions of various physical and socio-economic factors. Urbanization leads to increased pressure on freshwater resources as people become more concentrated in one area through the transformation of once natural landscapes to urban water-impervious lands, which limits available freshwater resources. Urban uses currently account for an average of 10%–20% of the total water withdrawals in developing world basins, with demand increasing rapidly as a direct result of population growth in urban areas. This can be attributed to the fact that most of the growth in the world’s population is taking place in urban areas in low and middle-income nations, and this is likely to continue.As the world's population grows, the demand for water mounts and pressure on finite water resources intensifies. Climate change, which is also closely tied to population growth, will also lead to greater pressures on the availability of water resources. The most water scarce or stressed areas are typically those with few water resources, high population densities, and high population growth rates. Population growth limits the amount of water available per person, drives people into marginal regions—which are already water stressed—and also into cities.