The socioeconomic consequences and management of climate change impacts on water resources

Climate change seems likely to impact upon both open-access water bodies and the costs of ensuring high quality domestic supplies. This paper describes separate studies examining willingness to pay to avoid climate change induced problems upon both of these resources in the UK. Values for avoiding impacts upon open-access water bodies are assessed using the contingent valuation method while those associated with avoiding non-health related impacts upon domestic water supplies are assessed using the choice experiment approach. Results suggest that impacts upon both resources would induce substantial losses of value.