Abstract
Jordan faces an archetypal combination of high water scarcity, with a per capita water availability of around 150 m3 per year significantly below the absolute scarcity threshold of 500 m3, and strong population growth, especially due to the Syrian refugee crisis. A transition to more sustainable water consumption patterns will likely require Jordan’s water authorities to rely more strongly on water demand management in the future. We conduct a case study of the effects of pricing policies, using an agent-based model of household water consumption in Jordan’s capital Amman, in order to analyze the distribution of burdens imposed by demand-side policies across society. Amman’s households face highly intermittent piped water supply, leading them to supplement it with water from storage tanks and informal private tanker operators. Using a detailed data set of the distribution of supply durations across Amman, our model can derive the demand for additional tanker water. We find that integrating these different supply sources into our model causes demand-side policies to have strongly heterogeneous effects across districts and income groups. This highlights the importance of a disaggregated perspective on water policy impacts in order to identify and potentially mitigate excessive burdens.
Highlights
The water sector in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan faces the challenge of finding ways to use its increasingly scarce resources in a sustainable manner
In this paper we develop an agent-based model (ABM) that highlights the relevance of this idea in a case study of household water consumption in Jordan’s capital, Amman
The ABM consists of representative household agents, which simulate the behavior of average high- and low-income households belonging to different piped water intermittency categories in each of the districts in Amman
Summary
The water sector in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan faces the challenge of finding ways to use its increasingly scarce resources in a sustainable manner. This will likely entail some degree of demand-side policy interventions and changes to current consumption patterns. While such changes can be crucial for the long-term sustainability of the water sector and the welfare of the society depending on it, they can temporarily impose undesirable burdens on some parts of society. In this paper we develop an agent-based model (ABM) that highlights the relevance of this idea in a case study of household water consumption in Jordan’s capital, Amman. Piped water supply in Amman and most other parts of Jordan is characterized by a high degree of intermittency, meaning that households only receive piped water for a limited number of days per week, depending on their location
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