國立高雄大學圖資館 |

Planning for Affordable Water Access Under Climate Change /

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Planning for Affordable Water Access Under Climate Change /Jennifer Skerker.
Author:	Skerker, Jennifer,
Description:	1 electronic resource (195 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-05, Section: A.
Notes:	Advisors: Fletcher, Sarah Committee members: Freyberg, David; Osman, Khalid.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International87-05A.
Subject:	Censuses.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=32316367
ISBN:	9798265426604

Planning for Affordable Water Access Under Climate Change /
Skerker, Jennifer,

Planning for Affordable Water Access Under Climate Change /Jennifer Skerker. - 1 electronic resource (195 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-05, Section: A.

Affordable, safe, reliable water access is a human right. All people should have adequate water for drinking and domestic uses, and water access should not come at the cost of other necessities, like food or medical care. Over the past few decades, interest and concerns surrounding water affordability have grown in developed countries, as water costs are rapidly rising due to aging infrastructure, emerging contaminants, and climate change. In particular, climate change challenges water supply planning in many regions by increasing demands as temperatures rise, and increasing uncertainty in supplies through longer, more severe, or more frequent droughts; decreasing average conditions; and larger interannual variability. Utilities often address supply-side uncertainties by investing in alternative sources and overbuilding infrastructure to improve system redundancy. However, new water supply investments are expensive, and under the current US financing model, capital investments are mainly paid for through higher water rates, increasing household water affordability burdens. Additionally, the most common method to measure household water affordability, the affordability ratio, typically does so at the community scale, despite many related challenges being felt at the household level. This dissertation research focuses on measuring, modeling, and addressing water affordability issues, with a focus on how climate change could exacerbate current challenges necessitating approaches that plan for uncertainty.Chapter 2 assesses how water bill late payment data, including the frequency, duration, and severity of bill delinquencies, can effectively measure household-level water affordability challenges. This work utilizes billing data in the City of Santa Cruz, California, from 2009-2021 to compute household-level metrics. We first assess city-wide water use and cost trends over time across households. Then, we compute our three delinquency metrics for all single-family households and compare the metrics to each other and census block-group level affordability ratios. Then, we examine how our metrics relate to water use and housing characteristics. We find that delinquency frequency and duration show promise as useful household-level affordability metrics, exhibiting high correlations with each other and with proxies for low wealth, like smaller home main areas and lower home tax values. Additionally, census block groups with similar affordability ratios exhibit diverging delinquency behavior, suggesting that aggregated affordability ratios may mask affordability challenges across sub-populations.Chapter 3 develops the first comprehensive modeling framework to understand how climate change exacerbates household water affordability challenges. Our framework integrates climate, infrastructure, and social drivers through combining Santa Cruz's current water supplyplanning model with household water demand, infrastructure financing, and rate design components under multiple climate change and adaptation scenarios. We focus on the need for new infrastructure investments to ensure reliable water supplies under a range of uncertain future climate conditions. We measure household water demands, bills, and affordability burdens across future scenarios. We find that under climate change, more than one third of households in Santa Cruz could struggle to pay their water bills, and that half of all low-income households could pay upwards of 7.4% of their income on water, almost triple the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s recommended affordability threshold. Additionally, the causal mechanisms through which climate change impacts water supply and demand are relevant in any water-stressed city with a large low-income population.

English

ISBN: 9798265426604Subjects--Topical Terms:

1010484
Censuses.

Planning for Affordable Water Access Under Climate Change /
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520 $a Affordable, safe, reliable water access is a human right. All people should have adequate water for drinking and domestic uses, and water access should not come at the cost of other necessities, like food or medical care. Over the past few decades, interest and concerns surrounding water affordability have grown in developed countries, as water costs are rapidly rising due to aging infrastructure, emerging contaminants, and climate change. In particular, climate change challenges water supply planning in many regions by increasing demands as temperatures rise, and increasing uncertainty in supplies through longer, more severe, or more frequent droughts; decreasing average conditions; and larger interannual variability. Utilities often address supply-side uncertainties by investing in alternative sources and overbuilding infrastructure to improve system redundancy. However, new water supply investments are expensive, and under the current US financing model, capital investments are mainly paid for through higher water rates, increasing household water affordability burdens. Additionally, the most common method to measure household water affordability, the affordability ratio, typically does so at the community scale, despite many related challenges being felt at the household level. This dissertation research focuses on measuring, modeling, and addressing water affordability issues, with a focus on how climate change could exacerbate current challenges necessitating approaches that plan for uncertainty.Chapter 2 assesses how water bill late payment data, including the frequency, duration, and severity of bill delinquencies, can effectively measure household-level water affordability challenges. This work utilizes billing data in the City of Santa Cruz, California, from 2009-2021 to compute household-level metrics. We first assess city-wide water use and cost trends over time across households. Then, we compute our three delinquency metrics for all single-family households and compare the metrics to each other and census block-group level affordability ratios. Then, we examine how our metrics relate to water use and housing characteristics. We find that delinquency frequency and duration show promise as useful household-level affordability metrics, exhibiting high correlations with each other and with proxies for low wealth, like smaller home main areas and lower home tax values. Additionally, census block groups with similar affordability ratios exhibit diverging delinquency behavior, suggesting that aggregated affordability ratios may mask affordability challenges across sub-populations.Chapter 3 develops the first comprehensive modeling framework to understand how climate change exacerbates household water affordability challenges. Our framework integrates climate, infrastructure, and social drivers through combining Santa Cruz's current water supplyplanning model with household water demand, infrastructure financing, and rate design components under multiple climate change and adaptation scenarios. We focus on the need for new infrastructure investments to ensure reliable water supplies under a range of uncertain future climate conditions. We measure household water demands, bills, and affordability burdens across future scenarios. We find that under climate change, more than one third of households in Santa Cruz could struggle to pay their water bills, and that half of all low-income households could pay upwards of 7.4% of their income on water, almost triple the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s recommended affordability threshold. Additionally, the causal mechanisms through which climate change impacts water supply and demand are relevant in any water-stressed city with a large low-income population.
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