Water Supply Under Conditions of Scarcity and Willingness-to-Pay to Maintain Service Performance

Extreme climate events such as droughts significantly challenge drinking water systems, which were initially designed for stable conditions. While public perception is often identified as the main obstacle to implementing measures aimed at reducing vulnerability and improving resilience, this study seeks to reveal consumers' preferences. Using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE), it assesses households' willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid certain impacts of drought on the performance of drinking water services, looking ahead to 2030. The survey was conducted in the Walloon region of Belgium during the summer of 2022, on residents of municipalities that had already faced water restrictions during drought periods in recent years. A latent class logit model is used to capture preference heterogeneity and two classes are identified. Those referred to as ‘short-term utilitarian' consumers attach greater importance to the probability of being affected by the consequences of droughts than to the actual effects of these events on the service provided (pressure, restrictions, etc.). By contrast, the ‘collectivist-ecologist' respondents highly value stakeholders' shared efforts at reducing water consumption. Given their higher incomes, they also have greater means to pay for future service quality maintenance. These results may assist the water utility in developing its drought-risk adaptation plan, ensuring its capacity to deliver the level of service expected by consumers.