The Valuation of Water Quality: A Conceptual Framework for Households’ and Producers’ Willingness to Pay in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Ariful Islam ,Siti Aqlima Ahmad ,Md Rabiul Islam

doi:10.7176/jesd/10-2-18

Abstract

Restoring the freshwater ecosystems has drawn global attention, governmental and non-governmental organizations around the globe incorporating several strategies to revive the last remaining free-flowing rivers and other high priority freshwater ecosystems. Rivers in urban setting have social, economic and ecological importance and demise of such rivers might affect many of its inhabitant’s life and living which has been established, survived and flourished over the years. Often, restoration of the river ecosystem seems challenging to the policy makers because the river ecosystem services have no price tag. Improving water quality program requires precise information about the costs and benefits which in urban areas needs to incorporate an integrated approach that implement necessary societal and technical measures. This study provides a conceptual framework using both households’ and producers’ willingness to pay for the river water quality improvement to acquire maximum information for successful restoration program. This study provides useful information which may help for further improvement of the water quality in an alike problem of developing countries. Future studies should validate empirically the proposed research framework. Keywords: Urban River Restoration, Households’ WTP, Producers’ WTP, Conceptual Framework DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-2-18

Highlights

The water quality crisis confronts the present world due to results of the increased growth of pollution in water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and wetlands
As the groundwater resource depleting extensively, the water supply to the households and industries in coming years appears as a great challenge for DWASA to meet the future water demand, thereby need to know how the households and industries place value on surface water and its quality. While both the households and industries are responsible for water pollution, many studies have measured the willingness to pay for improving water quality from the households' perspective only
Since rivers provide us with general life support, water supply, transportation, waste assimilation, and a wide array of recreation and tourism activities, preservation and protection of rivers’ water quantity and quality is very important

Summary

Introduction

The water quality crisis confronts the present world due to results of the increased growth of pollution in water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. The water quality of many rivers in several developing countries has been found worst and contaminated with chemical pollutants and pathogens from untreated urban runoff and sewage. This is because primarily of higher population and economic growth within these countries (United Nations Environment Program [UNEP], 2015). The population boom and the rapidly growing cities with inadequate urban design have resulted in the rivers as the dumping station of untreated industrial waste and sewage (Silva et al, 2016). The rivers in other developing countries such as Bangladesh are struggling to overcome the crisis of water quality, in the urban regions. The framework will be best suited with stated preference methods of contingent valuation or contingent choice method to evaluate total willingness to pay

Literature Review

Conceptual Framework of the Study

Findings

Conclusion