The Productivity Commission released its final research report into ÂRural Water Use and the Environment: The Role of Market Mechanisms in August 2006. The report indicates that there is scope for markets to play a greater role in improving the efficient use of water, including for environmental purposes. The Commission suggests that governments should give greater recognition to the integrated nature of water resources and use markets to more efficiently allocate water among competing users. Water for environmental purposes can be obtained cost effectively through purchasing a range of water products from willing sellers on the open market, including, but not limited to, water entitlements. This can often be more cost effective than investing in new infrastructure works: Markets can also be used to achieve other environmental goals, such as managing salinity, but need to be targeted to location and scale  no Âone size fits all. Unless accounted for, climate change, farm dams, vegetation and land-use change, groundwater extractions or changes in irrigation management have the potential to undermine efforts to achieve environmental goals and affect the reliability of existing entitlements. Governments should press ahead with the National Water Initiative, especially refining and clarifying property rights, undertaking further research on water systems and improving water accounting.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Productivity Commission in its series Commissioned Studies with number
8020.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)