Abstract
Anthropogenic pressures have exacerbated self-sustaining river services, and growing concerns over sustaining river system become global problematic issues that lead us to implement river restoration projects. Of those projects, governing diverse needs and desires from stakeholders for those who have various water values are key elements of identifying the success of the project. In fact, the Korean government has had concern over restoring the rivers which brings to construct 16 weirs in four major rivers and may fail to achieve main goal of the project, which is to ameliorate water quality. In this study, principle component analysis and multinomial logit model were executed to investigate major socioeconomic variables to influence water values in terms of sustainability in Korea. Evitable evidences have been found that age, income, education level, and city dwelling are the most effective variables to estimate water values. In addition, a monotonous water development project and a myopic view could cause major dejection across the nation and may lead to the failure of water governance. Unfortunately, the latter may be observed in Korea as one of the reasons for the recent amplification of major conflicts.
Highlights
Water is a fundamental resource for human survival and a key ingredient for sustaining economic development
We investigated the heterogeneous water value and assessed a past mega project, the four major rivers restoration project, in the context of sustainable development to enhance national-level water value in Korea
Estimates of factor loading from principal component analysis (PCA) are clearly categorized into three parts, which align with an assumption that the value of water can be divided into three dimensions: (1) environmental value, (2) social value including historical and cultural value, and (3) economic value
Summary
Water is a fundamental resource for human survival and a key ingredient for sustaining economic development. In 2008, the president of the Republic of Korea announced the national-level development strategy called “Low-Carbon Green Growth” that allow the economic structure to shift from a conventional development to an environmental friendly one [3] This action envisioned a new growth pathway and emphasized sound natural resources management for the future water scarcity, coupled with forecasted climate change scenarios. The main purpose of this mega project is to prevent flood, to capture sufficient water resources, to improve water quality, and to increase total water volume up to 1.3 billion cubic meters [4] In spite of these good intentions, Lee et al [5] pointed out that policy makers excessively overused public expenditure and ignored various stakeholders’ water demand related to it values.
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