Ignacio Cazcarro

Multiregional input-output model for the evaluation of Spanish water flows.

We construct a multiregional input-output model for Spain, in order to evaluate the pressures on the water resources, virtual water flows, and water footprints of the regions, and the water impact of trade relationships within Spain and abroad. The study is framed with those interregional input-output models constructed to study water flows and impacts of regions in China, Australia, Mexico, or the UK. To build our database, we reconcile regional IO tables, national and regional accountancy of Spain, trade and water data. Results show an important imbalance between origin of water resources and final destination, with significant water pressures in the South, Mediterranean, and some central regions. The most populated and dynamic regions of Madrid and Barcelona are important drivers of water consumption in Spain. Main virtual water exporters are the South and Central agrarian regions: Andalusia, Castile-La Mancha, Castile-Leon, Aragon, and Extremadura, while the main virtual water importers are the industrialized regions of Madrid, Basque country, and the Mediterranean coast. The paper shows the different location of direct and indirect consumers of water in Spain and how the economic trade and consumption pattern of certain areas has significant impacts on the availability of water resources in other different and often drier regions.

Water Consumption Based on a Disaggregated Social Accounting Matrix of Huesca (Spain)

Making use of the social accounting matrix (SAM) of the Spanish province of Huesca in 2002, updated following Junius and Oosterhavens GRAS method and work by Lenzen and colleagues, we have estimated the water footprint of the region. The water footprint is defined as the volume of water needed for the production of the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants plus the direct consumption in the households. We built an open Leontief model, which gives us the water embodied in the production of goods. The valuations concern the industrial, service, and domestic sectors’ water consumption, the embodied water imported from and exported to other countries, and the agrarian water use. This agrarian sector, clearly the sector that shows the greatest water consumption, is carefully examined, so it is disaggregated for the calculations into 31 irrigation land products, dry land, and 9 livestock classifications. As a consequence, the framework enables the observation of the relationships and flows of water taking place among all the sectors and activities in the economy. Finally, we also make use of the per capita water footprint estimations to get a clear picture of how the responsibility for water use is distributed once foreign trade is taken into account.

Water Rates And The Responsibilities Of Direct, Indirect And End-Users In Spain

Irrigation is the main user of water in Spain, and the price paid for this resource has long been lower than its cost. The recent EU Water Framework Directive requires that all costs be recovered, but application has had perverse effects. In some cases, farms have become economically unviable, while in others, cultivation has intensified and water consumption has increased. This paper applies a slightly modified version of the computable general equilibrium model developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (Lofgren et al., 2002), to a SAM (Social Accounting Matrix) of the province of Huesca in north-eastern Spain. The model disaggregates the agricultural sectors into irrigated and unirrigated farming, taking into account the improvements in irrigation efficiency. Within this framework, we analyse different payment scenarios affecting direct users, exporters and end-users in order to examine user responsibilities, the impact of international markets and macroeconomic effects on agriculture and industry in Spain.

The global economic costs of the need to treat polluted water

ABSTRACT We estimate the global costs and other implications of the need to treat wastewater before it can be re-used. We extend the World Trade Model by creating water treatment sectors and provide alternative sources of water for satisfying users’ quantity and quality requirements. The database distinguishes qualities and quantities of water endowments, sectoral water requirements, and wastewater discharges. We estimate that global water treatment costs could be reduced by several trillion dollars if water endowments were maintained at higher quality than currently is the case. Under scenarios where water quality degrades further, the treatment costs more than double even without taking account of likely increases in quality requirements. This modeling framework provides a starting point not only for more detailed empirical investigations of water management strategies, but also for examining prospects and associated costs for recovering other resources, such as metals, which can be reused multiple times.

Tracking Water Footprints at the Micro and Meso Scale: An Application to Spanish Tourism by Regions and Municipalities

Making the link between the different economic scales - local, regional, and global - and the impacts associated with more global behavior is a natural extension of traditional environmentally extended input‐output (I‐O) modeling. In this article, we highlight the capabilities of combining the meso level (i.e., regional) I‐O models with geographical information systems (GIS) and micro data to lower the spatial scale. This methodology lets us provide information to municipalities (what we call the micro scale) on their water footprints (WFs) at a lower spatial level than that of Spanish regions (what we call meso scale), at which economic I‐O data are available. Based on a multiregional I‐O model for the Spanish regions, we analyze the local water impacts of tourism activity in Spain. We focus on the explicit spatial identification of areas of strong final demand (normally the most populated) tracking back the associated footprints to the original hotspots or vulnerable areas (micro scale), where most water withdrawal had taken place. The spatial divergence between the production and the consumption responsibilities arise because consumers and producers usually have very different characteristics, particularly with respect to tourism. We find highest geographic dispersion of WFs of consumption arising from domestic tourism, followed by domestic household consumption, and finally foreign tourism WF. Foreign tourism WF is more concentrated in time and space. Foreign tourism in Andalusia requires directly and indirectly (WF) 617 cubic hectometers (hm3) and in Madrid 440 hm3, indicating that such tourism in both regions accounts for some of the highest water intensities per euro (€) spent by a foreign tourist, around 0.1 cubic meters/€.

Environmental Footprints and Scenario Analysis for Assessing the Impacts of the Agri-Food Industry on a Regional Economy

The study of the environmental footprints of various sectors and industries is increasingly demanded by institutions and by society. In this context, the regional perspective is becoming particularly important, and even more so in countries such as Spain, where the autonomous communities have the primary responsibility for implementing measures to combat environmental degradation and promote sustainable development, in coordination with national strategies. Taking as a case study a Spanish region, Aragon, and significant economic sectors, including agriculture and the food industry, the aim of this work is twofold. First, we calculate the associated environmental footprints (of emissions and water) from the dual perspectives of production (local impacts) and consumption (final destination of the goods produced by the agri‐food industry). Second, through a scenarios analysis, based on a general equilibrium model designed and calibrated specifically for the region, we evaluate the environmental implications of changes in the agri‐food industry (changes in the export and import pattern, as well as in consumer behavior). This model provides a flexible approximation to the environmental impacts, controlling for a wider range of behavioral and economic interactions. Our results indicate that the agri‐food industry has a significant impact on the environment, especially on water resources, which must be responsibly managed in order to maintain the differential advantage that a regional economy can have, compared to other territories.

Applying the global RCP–SSP–SPA scenario framework at sub-national scale: A multi-scale and participatory scenario approach

To better anticipate potential impacts of climate change, diverse information about the future is required, including climate, society and economy, and adaptation and mitigation. To address this need, a global RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways), SSP (Shared Socio-economic Pathways), and SPA (Shared climate Policy Assumptions) (RCP-SSP-SPA) scenario framework has been developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR5). Application of this full global framework at sub-national scales introduces two key challenges: added complexity in capturing the multiple dimensions of change, and issues of scale. Perhaps for this reason, there are few such applications of this new framework. Here, we present an integrated multi-scale hybrid scenario approach that combines both expert-based and participatory methods. The framework has been developed and applied within the DECCMA1 project with the purpose of exploring migration and adaptation in three deltas across West Africa and South Asia: (i) the Volta delta (Ghana), (ii) the Mahanadi delta (India), and (iii) the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) delta (Bangladesh/India). Using a climate scenario that encompasses a wide range of impacts (RCP8.5) combined with three SSP-based socio-economic scenarios (SSP2, SSP3, SSP5), we generate highly divergent and challenging scenario contexts across multiple scales against which robustness of the human and natural systems within the deltas are tested. In addition, we consider four distinct adaptation policy trajectories: Minimum intervention, Economic capacity expansion, System efficiency enhancement, and System restructuring, which describe alternative future bundles of adaptation actions/measures under different socio-economic trajectories. The paper highlights the importance of multi-scale (combined top-down and bottom-up) and participatory (joint expert-stakeholder) scenario methods for addressing uncertainty in adaptation decision-making. The framework facilitates improved integrated assessments of the potential impacts and plausible adaptation policy choices (including migration) under uncertain future changing conditions. The concept, methods, and processes presented are transferable to other sub-national socio-ecological settings with multi-scale challenges.

Environmental Footprints and Scenario Analysis for Assessing the Impacts of the Agri‐Food Industry on a Regional Economy: A Case Study in Spain

The study of the environmental footprints of various sectors and industries is increasingly demanded by institutions and by society. In this context, the regional perspective is becoming particularly important, and even more so in countries such as Spain, where the autonomous communities have the primary responsibility for implementing measures to combat environmental degradation and promote sustainable development, in coordination with national strategies. Taking as a case study a Spanish region, Aragon, and significant economic sectors, including agriculture and the food industry, the aim of this work is twofold. First, we calculate the associated environmental footprints (of emissions and water) from the dual perspectives of production (local impacts) and consumption (final destination of the goods produced by the agri‐food industry). Second, through a scenarios analysis, based on a general equilibrium model designed and calibrated specifically for the region, we evaluate the environmental implications of changes in the agri‐food industry (changes in the export and import pattern, as well as in consumer behavior). This model provides a flexible approximation to the environmental impacts, controlling for a wider range of behavioral and economic interactions. Our results indicate that the agri‐food industry has a significant impact on the environment, especially on water resources, which must be responsibly managed in order to maintain the differential advantage that a regional economy can have, compared to other territories.

Water Footprint and Consumer Products

Water footprints of specific crops, animal, food products and forest products may typically be better captured by the study of the chains of these products with techniques under frameworks such as life cycle assessment (LCA), given the great heterogeneity in water intensities among most of these categories. Apart from these type of studies, with process analysis/specific supply chains view, also studies on Water Footprinting have been developed making use of more top-down techniques and analyses, such as extended environmental input-output (IO) models. In this regard, we examine these results making use of global multiregional IO (MRIO) databases such as World Input-Output Database (WIOD) and EXIOBASE. With them we can quantify the water footprints (WFs) of production and WFs of consumption of all (somehow aggregated) consumer products for different years in the period of 1995–2009. Results can be disaggregated by sectors and consumption categories, and compared with those results being obtained from the process analysis types of techniques. This lead us to characterize the appropriateness of each methods depending on the types of consumer products, considering also the type of supply chains up to the consumers, the boundary conditions established, etc. In particular MRIOs may suffer from aggregation errors, but also in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world they may have a role for WFs, especially to get industrial and even services ones, particularly for the computations of blue and grey water. Also avenues for integration of methods and open and future lines of research are discussed.

Modelling regional policy scenarios in the agri-food sector: a case study of a Spanish region

ABSTRACT The agri-food industry has several features of great importance for sustainable economic growth in rural areas. The objective of this work is to evaluate the effects associated with different scenarios of growth, and changes in the regional agri-food industry. These scenarios simulate changes in exports and imports, changes in technology and changes in the level of industrial integration. We develop a computable general equilibrium model calibrated for the region. Our results indicate that policies trying to improve the competitiveness and dynamism of strategic sectors as the agro-industrial complex in this regional economy exert positive effects on its growth and income, having notable impacts on local job markets but also in other sectors and activities linked through the whole production chain.