On Monday 25 April 2016, King’s Water will host Professor Dale Whittington from the Departments of Environment Sciences & Engineering, and City & Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Professor Whittington will discuss his latest paper on water tariffs in a seminar titled “Evaluating the Performance of Alternative Municipal Water Tariff Designs”.
There are many reasons to get water prices right. Increasing water scarcity and climate change now need to be added to the list. Climate change in particular presents water and wastewater utilities with a complex new set of management and strategic challenges, especially in developing countries. One important way for water utilities to deal with the uncertainty introduced by climate change is to maintain cash reserves that can be deployed to address problems as they arise. But few water utilities generate sufficient cash 
to cover their full costs, and typically are unable to invest to protect strategic capital assets from extreme events or to build new capital facilities to address changes in rainfall and streamflow variability. It is thus increasingly important for water utilities to adopt financially and economically sound water tariff designs that enable them to provide essential services to their customers. The talk will present a modelling framework for analysing how alternative municipal water tariff designs affect the criteria of cost recovery, equity, and economic efficiency.
The event will be held 2-4pm on Monday 25 April in Room K0.19 of the King’s Building on King’s College London’s Strand Campus. This seminar is co-hosted by the Contested Development Research Domain of the Department of Geography at King’s College London. For more information, see the event webpage.