Peter Rogers
Harvard University
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Featured researches published by Peter Rogers.
Water Policy | 2002
Peter Rogers; Radhika de Silva; Ramesh Bhatia
In 1992 the Dublin Water Principles claimed ‘‘water as an economic good’’ for the first time in a UN setting. But water has been recognized as an economic good for many centuries before 1992. Throughout Europe and the early United States private water supply companies thrived in a wide variety of settings. The ‘‘sanitary revolution’’ of the 19th century saw the demand for public ownership and management of most of these companies in the name of public health. This, of course, did not obviate the need for water to be treated as an economic good, but a heavy emphasis on the public-good nature of water and its disposal led to the development of heavily subsidized public systems. With the exception of France, this was the path followed in most countries around the world. In the late 1980s, however, the World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral institutions discovered the virtues of ‘‘privatization’’ in the provision of public services and with privatization all of the attendant problems of setting tariffs and prices. There are many different ways to promote equity, efficiency and sustainability in the water sector and water pricing is probably the simplest conceptually, but maybe the most difficult to implement politically. For example, the typical command and control approach taken in most countries with respect to water management leads to large government involvement because of its needs for detailed hands-on monitoring and measurement. Using price policies, however, still requires significant government intervention to ensure that equity and public goods issues are adequately covered. This paper focuses on the role of prices in the water sector and how they can be used to promote equity, efficiency, and sustainability.
Archive | 2006
Luis Martínez-Cortina; Peter Rogers; M. Ramón Llamas
This chapter attempts to bring together a set of disparate concepts that are fundamental to examining water as a resource and establishing the seriousness of the current and future water scarcity. As is well known, there is a plentiful supply of water considered at a global scale. However, as we examine scales much closer to individual humans, a pattern of great heterogeneity emerges. Some parts of the world have plentiful supplies of water, others have severe droughts; some plenty of high quality water, others with badly polluted waters; in some the rivers flow full, in others they are devoid of water for many days of the year. It would be simple if these differences were due only to the physical climate, but careful examination shows that there are large differences within the same climate zones that cannot be explained purely by climate and topography. In these cases, one sees the hands of human interference in terms of governance, property rights, and sheer population size. The situation may become much more serious in the badly impacted areas as the great climate change experiment unfolds. There is huge uncertainly associated with the predictions of climate for the 21st century. The chapter is able to be optimistic in the face of such uncertainty by pointing to several technical, economic, and social developments that can reduce the human footprint on the scarce supplies of easily accessible water. By relying more on rainfed agriculture and agricultural trade to meet food needs scarce irrigation water can focus upon higher value and less water using crops or can be diverted to high value municipal and industrial uses; improving the efficiency of current irrigation technologies will free up large quantities of water for other uses; relying upon new ecological sanitation techniques can greatly reduce the impact on water quality; and low cost breakthroughs of desalination cost which are now economically competitive with alternative sources of fresh water to meet the needs of urban populations anywhere in the world. In order for these solutions to the emerging crisis to be adopted much more attention will have to be paid as to how we as individuals and communities approach and the world community approaches the governance of water. A successful shift to effective governance will enable us to have sustainable water supplies for all well through the
American Journal of Agricultural Economics | 1970
Peter Rogers; Douglas V. Smith
The model we propose determines water balances for a project area and emphasizes interactions of a surface water-groundwater system within the economic context of irrigation management. The program selects the tubewell, canal and surface drainage capacities, the project size, and the cropping pattern. Operation of the system is assumed to proceed subject to certain constraints on continuity at the river; capacity of the canals, tubewells, and drainage channels; mining of groundwater; crop water requirements; availability of land of different soil types; and permissible cropping patterns. A detailed irrigation planning example is presented.
Wind Engineering | 2003
Scott Kennedy; Peter Rogers
This paper describes a chronological wind-plant simulation model for use in long-term energy resource planning. The model generates wind-power time series of arbitrary length that accurately reproduce short-term (hourly) to long-term (yearly) statistical behaviour. The modelling objective and methodology differ from forecasting models, which focus on minimizing prediction error. In the present analysis, periodic cycles are isolated from historical wind-speed data from a known local site and combined with a first-order autoregressive process to produce a wind-speed time series model. Corrections for negative wind-speed values and spatial smoothing for geographically disperse wind turbines are discussed. The resulting model is used to simulate the output from a hypothetical offshore wind-plant south of Long Island, New York. Modelled differences of power output between individual turbines result from wind speed variability; wake effects are not considered in this analysis.
Ecological Indicators | 2002
Kazi F. Jalal; Peter Rogers
Abstract This paper synthesizes the results of a collaborative study conducted by ADB and Harvard University under ADB’s Regional Technical Assistance 5542 (RETA 5542)—Environmental Indicators and Indices. The three methodological tools (cost of remediation (COR), environmental elasticity (EE) and environmental diamonds (ED)) used in the study are described and tested using new data from 16 countries. The study formulates the three methods that can be used to arrive at approximate costs to remediate environmental damage to the air, water, land and the ecosystems; makes an assessment of the state of environment vis-a-vis economic change; and provides a graphical representation of the state of the environment. It also gives an initial validation of the utility of environmental indices for assessing/reassessing on a micro-level the eco-environmental impacts of ADB’s past investments.
Water Resources Research | 1993
Peter Rogers; Christopher Hurst; Nagaraja Harshadeep
In many parts of the developing world investment in water resources takes a large proportion of the available public investment funds. As the conflicts for funds between the water and other sectors become more severe, the traditional ways of analyzing and planning water investments has to move away from project-by-project (or even a river basin-by-river basin) approaches to include the relationships of water investments to other sectors and to overall national development policies. Current approaches to water resources investments are too narrow. There is a need for ways to expand the strategic thinking of water sector managers. This paper develops a water resources planning methodology with the primary objective of giving insights into the linking of water sector investments and macroeconomic policies. The model optimizes the present value of investments for water resources development, while embedding a macroeconomic model into the framework to allow for an examination of the interactions between water investments, the growth in the agricultural sector, and the performance of the overall economy. A case study of Bangladesh is presented which shows how strategic thinking could lead to widely differing implications for water investments than would conventional water resources systems planning models.
Sustainability Science | 2014
Masatsugu Takamatsu; Akiyuki Kawasaki; Peter Rogers; Julia L. Malakie
Land-use change is one of the major factors that alter local and regional hydrology. For areas experiencing fast expansion of urban and agriculture areas, land-use changes often adversely affect stream flow and water resources at the local and watershed scale. The Sekong, Sesan, and Srepok (3S) Sub-basins are a part of the Lower Mekong River Basin and include land in Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos), and Viet Nam. The region is experiencing a dynamic land-use transition because of rapid changes in its economy, society, and environment. Major land-use changes include deforestation of native rain forest, expansion of agricultural and urban areas, and expansion of commercial plantation such as rubber trees. These land-use alterations have affected local and regional hydrologic processes, resulting in stream flow shortages during the dry season and flash flooding due to deforestation. In this research, deforestation in the 3S Sub-basins over the period 1993–1997 was analyzed using multi-logistic regression. The regression analysis indicated that density of agricultural cells within a 5-km radius from each forest cell and slope strongly affected the deforestation process. A land-use forecast model to simulate deforestation and urbanization sites was developed in GIS based on local land-use change trends. The model was applied to 2003 land use to forecast 2033 land use and future water demand, which was further compared with present stream flow measurements during the dry season at various places in the region. The entire approach from the land-use forecast to its impact assessment on stream flow could help local stakeholders understand watershed-wide future water resources risks and develop future water resources plans. With the 3S Sub-basins being used as a case study area, this article presents a land-use forecast tool; simulated 2033 land-use and water demand; and the estimation of the impact of the forecasted future water demand on the local stream flow.
Climatic Change | 1997
Peter Rogers
To explore how uncertain climate events might affect investment decisions that need to be made in the near future, this paper examines (1) the relative magnitude of the uncertainties arising from climate change on engineering design in water resources planning and (2) a restricted set of water resource planning techniques that deal with the repeated choice of investment decisions over time. The classical capacity-expansion model of operations research is exploited to show the relative impacts upon engineering design choices for variations in future demand attributable to changes in the climate or other factors and the possible shortfall of supply due to climate change. The type of engineering decisions considered in the paper are sequential, enabling adjustments to revealed uncertainty in subsequent decisions. The range of possible impacts analyzed in the paper lead to similar engineering design decisions. This result means that engineers must be on their guard with respect to under-design or over-design of systems with and without the threat of climate change, but that the sequential nature of the decision-making does not call for drastic action in the early time periods.
Biomass | 1983
Christopher Hurst; Peter Rogers
Abstract The role of cattle and buffalo in terms of their energy input into agriculture in the Indian subcontinent is briefly reviewed. The average bullock can produce work at about 500 W during a typical working year of 6 hours per day for 200 days, although this depends on the availability of fodder and the health of the animal. A model is presented which enables work done to be related to feed input energy and is used to estimate the limitations to work input for processes such as ploughing and water pumping which can be achieved for given fodder inputs. The implicit limits of agriculture imposed by use of animals in this way is assessed.
Archive | 2010
Jorge Ramirez-Vallejo; Peter Rogers
The virtual water concept and argument have been used to analyze the linkage between trade, food security, and water resources. The concept comes from the idea that water should be treated as a production factor and virtual water is the volume of water needed to produce a commodity or service. The virtual water argument then states that the importation of agricultural products that need important amounts of water represents the importation of water into a water-scarce country. The objective of this paper is to test the virtual water argument and to present some possible explanations why the theorem does not hold true. The paper suggests that the main reason for the failure of the argument resides in the strong assumption of price equalization, as well as other factors that distort trading patterns such as government programs and subsidies. Using Mexico as a case study, the paper shows that the water price equalization hypothesis does not hold true, and that various factors, such as the level of agricultural trade liberalization, influence virtual water flows rather than water endowments. Trade liberalization via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) significantly influenced the level of virtual water flows between Mexico and the United States.