Integrated Analysis of Land Use and Water Quality: Economic, Hydrological and Policy Analysis

Abstract

Land use and changes in that use play a major role in determining the quality of rivers and lakes. Indeed the effectiveness of water quality management will always be compromised without a clear understanding of land use influences. However, land use is determined by a complex array of drivers including policy (e.g. the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy), market forces (e.g. changes in commodity prices, input costs, etc.), cross-sectional environmental variation (e.g. soil type, rainfall, etc.) and temporal environmental variation (e.g. the effects of climate change such as temperature variance, etc.). While controlling for these drivers the project focuses upon the role of policy making. However, land use policy suffers from systematic inadequacies in that it often focuses upon a single issue (e.g. increasing agricultural production) without considering the indirect effects of such changes (e.g. water pollution). Furthermore, many of these indirect effects occur outside the remit of market values, further impeding their incorporation within decision-making systems.