Although the terms efficiency, equity, and environmental sustainability are often mentioned in the same breath in agricultural water management, less attention has been paid to equity than to efficiency and environmental sustainability. This occurs because equity involves making decisions about people and trade-offs in distribution and outcomes of which decision-makers have little quantitative knowledge. This paper aims to clarify the conceptual issues that arise in assessing and quantifying equity issues in the water sector. The implications of ignoring equity in favour of efficiency in the water sector are great. Understanding the equitable status of a distribution relies on four basic principles involving how the distribution of the resources is defined, determining what constitutes a fair distribution, how the resources are valued, and how redistribution problems are handled. Equity is a negotiated concept where shares of a resource or good are, in some cases, determined through a political process of debate, one that could be argued results in less equitable outcomes than desired.

Governments justify decisions on irrigation projects partly because of the social benefits they have, i.e. the values that add to the wider objectives to society. Assessing social values is complex and can be approached in various ways. Cost-benefit analysis is too simplistic. The aim in this paper is to identify social values and to suggest an approach to assess them ex-post more comprehensively. Correlations between water applied and indicators of social objectives in individual regions have been used to show whether the social values associated with irrigation exist. Their extent and impact have been assessed using applied regression techniques.

Could irrigation water pricing be reformed so that the practice of irrigation is less harmful? Answering this question requires insights into how water pricing reform works for different irrigators/crops each with its own price elasticity of irrigation water demand and water supply, and into the political complexity of irrigation water pricing reform. In particular, the full benefits and costs associated with irrigation are an important, but often inadequately understood, element in irrigation water pricing reform. In this paper, these insights are investigated using the theoretical concepts of supply and demand. It is shown that the market cannot provide the full benefits from irrigation and ignores the full costs. It is also shown that the shape of the irrigation water supply and demand schedules, the current equilibrium position and the size of the charge required to get to a socially optimum position all work against irrigation water pricing as a tool that can be used to reduce demand. These concepts can be used to assess the implications of irrigation pricing reform comprehensively, explicitly and consistently, so that the implicit subsidies and externalities become visible.

Is the evidence sufficiently strong enough to justify the belief that irrigation (water applied) has a beneficial socio-economic impact on people in regional Australia? Using correlation coefficients, it was found that while a strong relationship existed between water applied and irrigators' incomes (0.91) and production (0.87), the links were much weaker to dryland farmers' incomes (0.49), the wider total regional income (0.41) and total employment (0.42). Weak links were found to exist with employment density (0.24), per capita incomes (0.03) and a measure of well-being (0.11) of people living in regions where more water was applied.

Worldwide, water scarcity, profit-cost pressure and restructuring of agricultural markets have led to on-farm diversification. The Goulburn Valley’s (GV) pome and stone fruit farms, in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, present potential lessons for the conditions under which alternative crops can sustain livelihoods. This research uses a mixed methods approach to assess the viability of vegetable production in the GV region. Quantitative and qualitative data collected from primary and secondary sources were analysed within the conceptual framework of ‘opportunity and ability to diversify’. The favourable biophysical factors of GV region and a positive return on investment from vegetable production that is comparable with fruit production, provide an opportunity for crop diversification to the fruit farmers of the region. Socio-economic factors, including loss of market for fruit crops, family and peer group support and flexibility in vegetable production, supported crop diversification. Factors that prevented fruit growers from diversification include, risk to existing business, capital locked in fruit related infrastructure and lack of vegetable marketing knowledge, among other reasons. The approach highlights the underlying factors for crop diversification that can be applied to any region by agricultural extension agencies to evaluate the potential for diversification.

This article outlines some of the difficulties associated with valuing cultural heritage. They include the surmountable problems of pricing cultural heritage and the associated market failures inherent in all water systems. Critical to any attempt to value cultural heritage is the need to quantify exactly what cultural heritage encompasses. While the theoretical concept of economic value is a relatively simple one, applying it to cultural heritage can only be accomplished if it is well defined.

Subsidising irrigation is a legitimate approach that governments have used to achieve a set of social objectives. Yet it may simultaneously impose negative externalities, especially in the form of environment degradation. Could subsidies be reformed to be less harmful? To answer this question requires an insight into how various kinds of subsidies work, the interplay between subsidies and externalities, and the political complexity of subsidy reform. In this paper these insights are investigated using supply-demand graphs. It is argued in this paper that a broad definition of subsidies should be used, one that includes the implicit subsidies that result from partial cost recovery. It is also shown that even without subsidies, externalities due to irrigation would still exist and that any reform of existing subsidies will counter the positive impact irrigation may have, which may not be a desirable outcome.

In this study, the physical and economic impacts of four policy measures (crop diversification, improved watershed development, canal lining and reducing the level of reliability) all designed to improve bulk water supply, are assessed in a case study of the Musi catchment of India. The aim is to compare the impacts these policy measures have on the amount of bulk water supplied and the net economic returns across a complex multi-nodal catchment. It is argued that because it is policymakers who make decisions regarding these measures, an assessment of the private benefits to a subset of users would not be adequate. Rather, the society wide costs and benefits need to be considered. Using a hydroeconomic model of the catchment it was found that reducing the level of reliability was the most beneficial outcome from both a physical and economic perspective. The other three measures were found to have some adverse impacts on regions not directly affected by the measure.

In this paper a framework is presented for comparing the values derived from the different dimensions of water, without incurring the problems of commensurability. The framework is based on the concept of opportunity cost, which values any good by what one is willing to sacrifice to get it, which is a way of comparing seemingly different things. By simulating changes to a water resource and then measuring the economic, social and environmental impacts in metrics common and accepted by each dimension, a curve of the trade-offs between each metric can be derived. This makes trade-offs intrinsic to decision-making explicit.

The market demand and price of teak in Laos vary broadly and depend on several factors. The aim of this study was to assess timber trading and pricing based on a survey of teak buyers. The research investigated teak trading methods, markets and prices paid for particular timber types and quality grades. Three types of teak timber are commonly sold: 24.7% as standing trees, 39.6% as round logs and 35.7% as square logs. The main wood products produced from plantation teak include joinery products, door and window frames, and furniture (57.9%, 26.3% and 15.8% respectively). The end buyers of teak timber in Laos are sawmillers and wood manufacturer. Teak timbers supplied to end buyers from growers via the local traders account for 49.0%, followed by 41.3% by direct supply from teak growers and 9.7% via the local small sawmillers and wood manufacturers. The price of teak timber varies significantly based on four main factors: timber types, log sizes, log quality (grades) and distance from plantation site to road (for standing trees). The round log price of 250US$/m(3), based on both log diameter size (D26-30 cm) and log quality grade (A grade), was much lower than the 321US$/m(3) amount paid for the same size of round log (D26-30 cm) based on log diameter alone (no grading price). It can be concluded that there is a need to develop a clear system or standard for teak log grading and pricing in Laos.

Despite an ongoing dire prognosis of the state of water resources, water practitioners maintain their traditional approaches to water planning. Alternative water projects to those that are considered 'business-as-usual' are not contemplated despite the threats posed by increasing urbanisation and climate change. Previous studies in psychological perceptions of risk in other fields have found that the personal feelings of risk practitioners, particularly feelings of dread, have had a significant impact on risk perceptions, an element known to be affecting decision-making of an individual. Could a similar trend exist in the water sector? We consider the decision-making process of 77 water practitioners in Melbourne Australia, to determine their personal biases and attitudes towards these alternative water pathways. In particular, this study assesses the impact of cognitive bias on reported risk scores in the water sector. Utilising pre-validated risk psychology survey methodology ( Slovic et al, 1985), psychometric testing was conducted to determine the influences that guide their personal risk perceptions, and in turn, their decision-making processes. It was concluded that 'Dread' plays a key role in the variation of risk scores between the participants that were evaluated. Furthermore, variables such as 'Fear of the Unknown' and 'Dread related to perceived fatal risk' where also found to be statistically significant factors in the link between risk scores and cognitive bias. These findings are critical in water planning, as a feeling of dread may be driving up risk scores, thus reducing the chances of establishing alternative water projects.

Increasing water reliability in a catchment requires reducing the total quantity of water available to users in some years in order to supply it in more years when its supply is constrained. Thus, the more reliable the supply the more water that needs to be withheld. Consequently, increased levels of water reliability to a catchment, which reduces the costs associated with an unreliable supply, often comes at an incremental increase in costs that researchers do not consider; that of the water foregone that could be have been used productively if the system had been run less reliably. In this paper the trade-offs between the costs of water foregone to maintain a level of reliability and the costs associated with an unreliable supply of water at different levels of reliability in an irrigation system are discussed. The concepts developed are applied to the irrigation sector in the Musi catchment in Andhra Pradesh, India from 2011 to 2040. In this catchment it was found that the costs of water foregone to increase reliability rise as the level of reliability rises, while the benefits generally fall. When the level of reliability exceeded approximately 85% (where water is so scarce that it is used on only the most valuable output), the costs of greater reliability exceed the benefits resulting in net losses to the system. These results were found to vary in each demand centre across the catchment. These results have implications for those considering innovations that improve the level of reliability in a catchment.

Despite its obvious advantages, pricing irrigation water is not widely practiced because it is not easy to deploy effectively. Water authorities require an understanding of the objectives they hope to gain from it, the performance different pricing instruments have and the preconditions that must be met to enable them to work. Also, pricing instruments work under assumptions that do not hold in an environment where multiple market failures exist and their introduction may lead to a number of unintended consequences those who operate irrigation systems never considered. The aim in this paper is to outline the difficulties that are associated with implementing pricing instruments in the irrigation sector.

A survey of 77 water practitioners within Melbourne, Australia, highlighted the lack of objectiveness within current risk scoring processes. Each water authority adopted similar processes, all of which adhere to the ISO31000 standard on Risk Management, and these were tested within this study to determine the "objective" nature of technical risk assessments such as these. The outcome of the study indicated that current risk measurement approaches cannot be seen as objective. This is due to the high variation in risk scores between individuals, which indicates a level of subjectivity. The study confirms previous research that has been undertaken in assessing the effectiveness of risk matrices. This research is novel in its testing of the water sector's risk measuring practices and may be of value to other industries that utilize similar risk approaches. This research posits whether this subjectivity is due to inherent bias of either a psychological or cultural risk nature that could produce the varied scores.

The efficient management of agricultural water to meet its growing demand and to increase farm productivity has become a major concern in many agrarian countries. Various management principles, such as changes in governance, and crafting locally devised institutions have been prioritised in recent literature. The Nepalese government has considered farmers’ governance in managing irrigation systems as a successful irrigation policy. One of the measures for a successful farmer-managed irrigation systems (FMIS), each farmer must engage actively in collective choice actions and share both the costs and benefits from the system, proportionately. Various aspects in an institution affects farmers’ cooperative behavior to engage in the irrigation management process. A study of 232 FMIS in Nepal revealed that there is a need for a revised institutional design that can empower farmers by investing them with more defined property rights so that they can actively engage in maintenance activities.

In many circumstances within the water industry, project managers act as the gatekeepers for new infrastructure and water projects by way of determining, or at least providing, an assessment of whether to proceed with the project. Their assessments, which are considerably based on risk, disproportionately assume a technical, rational approach. Psychological, sociological and cultural risk approaches provide a comprehensive guide into how risks are assessed, highlighting areas that are not considered by the traditional technical risk approach. This article provides a review of these approaches, and in so doing contends that existing risk assessments in the water industry ignore sociological and psychological contexts in situations, leading to an assessment that may not be reliable.

How much C can be stored in agricultural soils worldwide to mitigate rising carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, and at what cost? This question, because of its critical relevance to climate policy, has been a focus of soil science for decades. The amount of additional soil organic C (SOC) that could be stored has been estimated in various ways, most of which have taken the soil as the starting point: projecting how much of the SOC previously lost can be restored, for example, or calculating the cumulative effect of multiple soil management strategies. Here, we take a different approach, recognizing that photosynthesis, the source of C input to soil, represents the most fundamental constraint to C sequestration. We follow a simple "Fermi approach" to derive a rough but robust estimate by reducing our problem to a series of approximate relations that can be parameterized using data from the literature. We distinguish two forms of soil C: 'ephemeral C', denoting recently-applied plant-derived C that is quickly decayed to CO2, and 'lingering C,' which remains in the soil long enough to serve as a lasting repository for C derived from atmospheric CO2. First, we estimate global net C inputs into lingering SOC in croplands from net primary production, biomass removal by humans and short-term decomposition. Next, we estimate net additional C storage in cropland soils globally from the estimated C inputs, accounting also for decomposition of lingering SOC already present. Our results suggest a maximum C input rate into the lingering SOC pool of 0.44 Pg C yr−1, and a maximum net sequestration rate of 0.14 Pg C yr−1 – significantly less than most previous estimates, even allowing for acknowledged uncertainties. More importantly, we argue for a re-orientation in emphasis from soil processes towards a wider ecosystem perspective, starting with photosynthesis.

Risk measurement has predominantly utilised the technical and scientific approach to risk, developed in the 1950s and 1960s.This 'rational' and 'objective' approach to assessing risks has not been updated and is still widely used within the water industry.Furthermore, it has been cemented in risk management standards, and acts as the key model for risk assessments.Risk research in the last forty years has proposed alternate theories that are highly critical of the systematic, 'rational' approach of these old risk practices.This criticism stems from the lack of incorporating psychological, sociological and cultural risk elements in assessments, thus limiting the scope of how risks are actually perceived by assessors.Psychological approaches consider the risk assessor's own affiliations with the risk, based on experience and other psychological factors.Sociological theories, such as those proposed by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, argue that the beliefs, or worldviews of the assessor more effectively describes how a risk will be evaluated.In this paper an approach to test the extent technical risk approaches can be deemed 'rational' and 'objective' and whether psychological or cultural theories of risk may be more effectively describe how risks are actually evaluated, are highlighted.The water sector's existing risk processes are used to test these theories; however, this paper only covers the methods utilised, not the results obtained.The water industry is highly regulated, and also (in most cases) government-led, acting as a good candidate for assessment of risk processes.Water management is also becoming an ever more pertinent issue.In circumstances of declining supply and increased demand, risk assessments act as the decision-making tool in the gateway to implementing new projects.Therefore, whether risks are assessed comprehensively will have long-term ramifications in water management.