Glenn-Marie Lange

This book presents a valuable new tool for water management - water resource accounting - which significantly advances the economic analysis of water. Water resource accounts integrate detailed information about water supply and use with national income accounts to show the economic use of water, costs and tariffs paid, and the economic value of water for different economic uses. Based on the UN's handbook for environmental accounting, this book describes the implementation and policy application of water accounts in three African countries - Botswana, Namibia and South Africa - and discusses how they have been used by water managers. The book compares water use across the three countries, explaining the differences in water resources and water policy. In addition to the comprehensive outline of physical and monetary water accounts for each country, the authors provide an extensive discussion of water valuation as well as addressing a number of issues of regional importance, including water accounting for an international river basin and the impact of trade on each country's water use. By demonstrating the usefulness of water resource accounts, this book makes a major contribution to the literature on water economics and management, sustainable development, and to the development of environmental accounting in general. The Economics of Water Management in Southern Africa will appeal to a wide readership including:environmental and development economistsNGOs concerned with sustainable developmentenvironmental advocacy groupsprofessionals (economists and environmentalists) working in Africa on water and sustainable development issueswater professionalsnational accounts experts and statisticians.

Environmental accounts bring together economic and environmental information in a common framework to measure the contribution of the environment to the economy and the impact of the economy on the environment. They enable governments to set priorities, monitor economic policies more precisely, enact more effective environmental regulations and resource management strategies, and design more efficient market instruments for environmental policies. Many industrialized countries compile environmental accounts, but progress in developing countries has been limited - even though the need for environmental accounts is perhaps more acute in these regions. Environmental Accounting in Action studies the experiences of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, the core countries of a unique, regional environmental accounting programme in Southern Africa. Covering minerals, forestry, fisheries and water, each chapter provides important lessons about sustainable resource management. As a whole, the case studies demonstrate how to overcome the many challenges of constructing environmental accounts and the mechanics of successful implementation. By providing a transparent system of information about the relationship between human activities and the environment, the accounts have improved policy dialogue among different stakeholders and have played a significant role in environmental policy design. This book advances a powerful argument for the use of environmental accounts and is a major contribution to the environmental literature on developing countries. Environmental and ecological economists, resource managers, policymakers, NGOs and anyone concerned with sustainable development will find this an informative and valuable read.

One of the most important and complex problems facing both developing and industrialized nations is how to sustain economic growth without harming the environment. Faye Duchin and Glenn-Marie Lange address this issue in a practical and realistic way: through a detailed evaluation of the well-known approach to sustainable development outlined in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future. Taking issue with the Brundtland Report's optimistic and widely accepted assumptions, the authors show that the positive effects of recycling, increased fuel-efficiency, and other technological adjustments will not go far enough to provide for truly sustainable development in the long term. Through a new, broad-based empirical analysis, they argue that unless there are significant changes in the use of technologies, continued environmental degradation cannot be avoided. They warn that the trend of making only slight adjustments in the use of technologies, while feasible from an economic point of view for industrialized nations, will undoubtedly lead to further environmental damage. In addition to offering a clear and unflinching look at what development is really doing to the global environment, the unique conceptual framework developed for this analysis provides an invaluable basis for analysis for the new, multidisciplinary field of ecological economics. Duchin and Lange describe how this new methodology will enable economists and policy-makers to evaluate our options for the future and choose those that most effectively reduce environmental degradation and achieve sustainable development.