A team of UCR water economists finds certain types of water conservation could have unintended consequences.
When it comes to water conservation in cities that depend on wastewater reuse, even the best intentions can have unintended consequences.
That’s the main message to be gleaned from new findings from a team of water economists and engineers led by Kurt Schwabe, a professor of environmental economics and policy and the associate dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside.
In an article published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability, Schwabe and his co-researchers take a close look at how water conservation measures taken in Southern California in the wake of a major drought affected the availability and quality of regional wastewater.
In addition to Schwabe, the paper’s co-authors include Mehdi Nemati, an assistant Cooperative Extension specialist in water resource economics and policy in UCR’s School of Public Policy; Refat Amin and Quynh Tran, two UCR alumni who now work for the California Public Utilities Commission and Los Angeles County Water Sanitation Districts, respectively; and David Jassby, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA.
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