Water price: environment sustainability and resource cost

Abstract

The determination of a price for water is an open discussion among related players, directly or indirectly, in water management. In the context of the recovery of water service costs, as referred to in Article 9 of the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC (WFD), legislation applicable in all member countries of the European Union, the total water cost is broken down into three blocks; financial, environmental, and resource. It is the last component that generates the most uncertainty both in its conceptualization and in its valuation. The need to establish a pricing system for water (water tariff) implies that the different concepts that make it up are correctly delimited. The main goal of this paper is to propose a first approximation to a new theoretical framework to establish a relationship between environmental sustainability and the valuation of the resource cost—given that current water consumption can provoke future water availability difficulties, making it a scarce commodity that resource cost must be correctly delimited. Taking into account the prospective nature of environmental sustainability, the measure of its value should be based on the use of stochastic models that reflect the associated uncertainty.