Economic Instruments for Sustainable Water Management in Water Scarce and Drought Prone Irrigated Areas – WATER INCENT

WATER INCENT is a project within the Marie Curie European Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) scheme for Experienced Researchers of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework programme. The project is developed by Dr. C. Dionisio Pérez-Blanco, under the direct scientific supervision of Dr. Jaroslav Mysiak.

The objective of WATER INCENT is advancing in the design and development of water markets and insurance arrangements in the agricultural sector that contribute to the implementation of an effective and efficient water policy mix in the EU. This objective will be built in two stages:

1) WATER INCENT will develop quantitative models to estimate the economic and environmental outcomes of proposed instruments under different scenarios. In the case of insurance schemes, Revealed Preference Models (RPM) will be used to estimate farmers’ Willingness To Pay (WTP) for this instrument. In the case of water markets, WATER INCENT will develop a methodology to nest RPM and Agent Based Models (ABM) and assess farmers’ behavior.

2) WATER INCENT will also use an analytical framework to critically assess the implementability and complementarities of both instruments in the current EU water policy context.

Methods will be illustrated with two case studies in the Po River Basin District (RBD) in Italy and the Segura RBD in Spain. The two areas have distinctive features and offer research complementarities: while the Segura ranks among the most overexploited river basins in the EU, the Po is an otherwise water abundant basin increasingly exposed to drought spells.