Muriel Travers

The impact of tap connection on water use: the case of household water consumption in Dakar, Senegal.

Predicting residential water demand for non-connected households that obtain connections is a crucial issue for water planners in developing countries. We propose a technique derived from Heckman (1976) to accurately measure the expected increase in water use due to access to tap water while controlling for differences in characteristics between connected and non-connected households. Illustration is made on a cross section of 246 households from Dakar, Senegal. We show that getting a tap connection induces an expected increase in water use of 26 L per capita per day.

Hazard and living environment: combining industrial risk and landscape representations.

In the context of the French estuary of the Seine River (Normandy), around the urban area of Le Havre, this paper studies the determinants of industrial risk perception of the resident population. More precisely, to what extent the presence of components in the industrial landscape may influence this risk perception. Several complementary methods were combined to evaluate risk perception, assess surrounding landscapes or measure the distance to landscape components. Qualitative, quantitative, and spatial data were collected, pooled and treated in a geographic information system in order to arrive at two main results. First, risk sensitivity depends on various factors including the landscape dimension and the visibility of industrial components. Second, mental maps drawn by people allow a better understanding of industrial risk sensitivity; it appears that areas of risk are more precisely delineated by people who are less worried about risk.