Abstract
Rather than setting water prices and leaving quantities to economic agents, water authorities may rather choose to cap water quantity and set the necessary conditions for voluntary trades to happen. From a wider perspective of water use (one not only constrained to water withdrawal and consumption but also to the disposal of polluting substances), water rights or entitlements could also be defined as pollution credits and be traded in water quality trading (WQT) schemes. This chapter presents a wide array of experiences both on water quantity and water quality trading. A successful experience on nutrient credit trading in the Great Miami River (Ohio, USA) is presented along with a non-fully successful one in North Carolina, from which insightful lessons can be drawn in terms of optimising the incentive design. Furthermore, a salinity offsetting scheme in Australia is also analysed. In terms of water quantity trading, incipient experiences in central Spain (Tagus river basin district) are analysed together with mature and dynamic experiences of deep markets in Chile, the Murray-Darling Basin (Australia) and Colorado (USA).
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Delacámara, G., Gómez, C.M. (2015). Water Trading: An Introduction. In: Lago, M., Mysiak, J., Gómez, C., Delacámara, G., Maziotis, A. (eds) Use of Economic Instruments in Water Policy. Global Issues in Water Policy, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18287-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18287-2_14
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