Unreliable and unequal public water supply already affects around one billion urban residents around the world. In many cities, informal water markets have emerged to fill public supply gaps by delivering water via tanker trucks, depleting scarce rural groundwater sources. A quintessential example of this can be found in the highly water-scarce country of Jordan. In Jordan, intermittent public water supply and rapid urban growth have led to a surge of uncontrolled groundwater abstractions by pervasive illegal tanker water markets. Here, we use a rigorous coupled human-natural systems model to assess a range of policy options for mitigating the groundwater impacts of informal water markets in Jordan with regards to their effectiveness and impacts on household water access. The model represents spatially distributed feedbacks between Jordan’s water sector and groundwater resources in country-wide scenario simulations until 2050. We find that investments in supply augmentation have limited impact on tanker water demand, unless they are combined with a more equitable and efficient distribution of public water supply. Jordan’s current policy of closing illegal tanker wells is found to impede the access of water-stressed households to tanker deliveries. Approaches for the legalization of tanker water markets provide more efficient policy options. Policy design is shown to be decisive for safeguarding household water access. Our findings show that understanding the role of informal water markets in urban water supply can be critical for reconciling sustainable groundwater management and household water security.

Scarce and unreliable urban water supply in many countries has caused municipal users to rely on transfers from rural wells via unregulated markets. Assessments of this pervasive water re-allocation institution and its impacts on aquifers, consumer equity and affordability are lacking. We present a rigorous coupled human–natural system analysis of rural-to-urban tanker water market supply and demand in Jordan, a quintessential example of a nation relying heavily on such markets, fed by predominantly illegal water abstractions. Employing a shadow-economic approach validated using multiple data types, we estimate that unregulated water sales exceed government licences 10.7-fold, equalling 27% of the groundwater abstracted above sustainable yields. These markets supply 15% of all drinking water at high prices, account for 52% of all urban water revenue and constrain the public supply system’s ability to recover costs. We project that household reliance on tanker water will grow 2.6-fold by 2050 under population growth and climate change. Our analysis suggests that improving the efficiency and equity of public water supply is needed to ensure water security while avoiding uncontrolled groundwater depletion by growing tanker markets.

Limited water availability, population growth, and climate change have resulted in freshwater crises in many countries. Jordan's situation is emblematic, compounded by conflict-induced population shocks. Integrating knowledge across hydrology, climatology, agriculture, political science, geography, and economics, we present the Jordan Water Model, a nationwide coupled human-natural-engineered systems model that is used to evaluate Jordan's freshwater security under climate and socioeconomic changes. The complex systems model simulates the trajectory of Jordan's water system, representing dynamic interactions between a hierarchy of actors and the natural and engineered water environment. A multiagent modeling approach enables the quantification of impacts at the level of thousands of representative agents across sectors, allowing for the evaluation of both systemwide and distributional outcomes translated into a suite of water-security metrics (vulnerability, equity, shortage duration, and economic well-being). Model results indicate severe, potentially destabilizing, declines in freshwater security. Per capita water availability decreases by approximately 50% by the end of the century. Without intervening measures, >90% of the low-income household population experiences critical insecurity by the end of the century, receiving <40 L per capita per day. Widening disparity in freshwater use, lengthening shortage durations, and declining economic welfare are prevalent across narratives. To gain a foothold on its freshwater future, Jordan must enact a sweeping portfolio of ambitious interventions that include large-scale desalinization and comprehensive water sector reform, with model results revealing exponential improvements in water security through the coordination of supply- and demand-side measures.

Currently, only 8.2 % of German surface water bodies reach European Water Framework Directive's ambitious goal of a "good ecological status" and many will presumably not reach the aim by 2027, too. The Directive allows less stringent environmental objectives, if a good status is not feasible or disproportionally expensive. Two related procedures to assess the disproportionality of costs, the benchmark approach and the average cost approach, are presented and empirically applied for 164 surface water bodies of a German federal state. The tests show that both approaches are suitable to support the competent authorities in finding consistent and transparent justifications why for certain water bodies reaching a good status might be disproportional. Several variations of the approaches are investigated and sensitivity analyses are conducted for those parameters, which are (necessarily) based on value judgments. The fields of application of the approaches as well as their limitations are discussed. Particularly, if measures for a water body have substantial upstream or downstream effects on other water bodies, as it is typical for measures improving passability, both tested approaches should be replaced by a cost-benefit assessment covering all affected water bodies.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is confronted with a severe freshwater crisis shaped by excess water demand and intermittent public supply. In Jordan’s capital and most populous city, Amman, the pervasive water shortage gave rise to private tanker water operations, which transport groundwater from wells in the vicinity of the city and sell it to urban consumers. These tanker water markets have received little attention in the literature up to date, particularly with regard to their relevance for commercial water users. This paper aims to empirically estimate the water demand of commercial establishments in Amman under public supply rationing and to assess to which extent tanker operations contribute to meeting commercial water needs. Building on a prior simulation model of residential water consumption, the results of three extensive surveys concerned with tanker water markets and various geographic data, we develop a spatial agent-based model of the water consumption behavior of commercial establishments in different sizes. According to our estimation, 35–45% of the overall water volume consumed by the commercial sector stems from tanker operations, depending on the season. We find that the local disparities in access to affordable network water, along with the dispersion of groundwater wells around the city, result in considerable spatial differences in tanker water consumption. The outcome of this analysis could be relevant for policy attempting to enhance freshwater sustainability in Jordan.

Rapid urban growth processes pose severe challenges to the existing water infrastructure, particularly in developing countries (see Bedtke and Gawel, Chap. 3 in this volume). Responding to these challenges might exceed the scope of a gradual change and require a sustainability-oriented system transformation (Kabisch and Kuhlicke 2014). This chapter examines the prospects for such an urban transformation in Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where the challenges of supplying water to all residents are particularly demanding. Since the year 2000, the population of the greater Amman municipality is estimated to have grown by more than one third (DOS 2014), and this trend can be expected to persist, due to continually high rates of immigration of Syrian refugees. In addition, Jordan is among the most water-scarce countries in the world (Yorke 2013) and is currently overexploiting its renewable groundwater sources by about 65% above the sustainable extraction rate (IRG 2015). Thus, making progress towards a more sustainable use of its freshwater resources is a matter of urgency. The pressing scarcity of water has led Miyahuna, the public water utility of Amman, to introduce a water quantity rationing scheme by which households only receive water for a limited number of hours per week, leading to perceived and actual water quality problems (supply interruptions can, e.g., lead to contaminant infiltration and the development of biofilms; see Hashwa and Tokajian 2004; Yorke 2013; Potter and Darmame 2010). Both the supply intermittency and the quality concerns have forced residents to intensify the use of various coping strategies (e.g., maintaining private storages, ordering private water tankers, purchasing bottled water), which further complicate any targeted steps to initiate a transformation of the public water supply system and water use patterns towards sustainability.

Arid developing countries face growing challenges from water scarcity, which are exacerbated by deficient pipedwater supply infrastructures. Increasing block tariffs (IBTs), charging higher rateswith increasing water consumption, can potentially reconcile cost recovery to finance these infrastructures with an equitable and affordable sharing of the cost burden. A firm understanding of the impacts of varying prices and socio-economic conditions on residential water demand is necessary for designing IBTs that promote these objectives. Consistently estimating water demand under an IBT requires a discrete/continuous choice (DCC) model. Despite this, few econometric studies of arid developing countries have applied this state-of-the-art approach. This paper applies a DCC model to estimate residential water demand under IBTs in the severely water-stressed country of Jordan, using 15,811 country-wide household-level observations from five years up to 2013. We extend Hewitt and Hanemann's original DCC formulation in order to accommodate IBTs featuring a linearly progressive tariff block. We then use the resulting demand function to assess Jordan's 2013 IBTs and alternative IBT designs. Under the estimated price elasticities, very few IBT designs achieve a full recovery of the financial costs of water provision, but we still identify a potential to improve cost recovery and affordability.

Currently only 8.2% of German surface water bodies have reached the goal of the European Water Framework Directive to bring all water into a "good status". For all water bodies that presumably will not achieve the objective by 2027, the member states have to justify an exemption by 2021, for example, by arguing that the costs of achieving "good status" would be "disproportionately high". In this paper, two approaches for assessing cost-disproportionality of surface water bodies are empirically tested and compared on a set of real-world data from a German federal state. In the first approach, called average cost approach, costs are considered as being disproportionately high if they are significantly higher than what would be a "relatively normal effort". The core idea of the second, the benchmark approach, is to take the past public expenditures on water management as a basis for comparison. Both approaches include generated utility for determination of a water-body-specific disproportionality threshold. While the benchmarking approach needs less data, the empirical tests indicate that both approaches yield comparable results and are suitable to support authorities in the decision as to which water bodies are to be considered disproportionately expensive such that exemptions are justified.

The ambitious objective pursued by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) is good status for all European waters. However, "less stringent environmental objectives" are permissible if the costs of achieving good status are disproportionately high. This exemption, if abused, carries the risk of watering down the ambitions of the Directive. Currently, no transparent, well-established, universally applicable method for routinely testing disproportionality exists throughout Europe. In this paper, such a method is developed for surface water bodies. The core idea is to determine a water body-specific disproportionality threshold which is then compared to the projected costs of achieving "good status/potential". For the sake of practicability, the benchmark for disproportionality is estimated on the basis of prior expenditure on water quality enhancement. The paper argues that the proposed method combines both possible interpretations of (dis-) proportionality affordability and cost-benefit considerations. Due to the method's moderate data requirements it can be used readily in most German federal states and is transferable in principle to other EU Member States. The method was tested empirically for a river in the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Jordan faces an archetypal combination of high water scarcity, with a per capita water availability of around 150 m3 per year significantly below the absolute scarcity threshold of 500 m3, and strong population growth, especially due to the Syrian refugee crisis. A transition to more sustainable water consumption patterns will likely require Jordan’s water authorities to rely more strongly on water demand management in the future. We conduct a case study of the effects of pricing policies, using an agent-based model of household water consumption in Jordan’s capital Amman, in order to analyze the distribution of burdens imposed by demand-side policies across society. Amman’s households face highly intermittent piped water supply, leading them to supplement it with water from storage tanks and informal private tanker operators. Using a detailed data set of the distribution of supply durations across Amman, our model can derive the demand for additional tanker water. We find that integrating these different supply sources into our model causes demand-side policies to have strongly heterogeneous effects across districts and income groups. This highlights the importance of a disaggregated perspective on water policy impacts in order to identify and potentially mitigate excessive burdens.