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Past and Future Freshwater Use in the United States - A Technical Document Supporting the 2000 USDA Forest Service RPA Assessment (Paperback)
Loot Price: R340
Discovery Miles 3 400
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Past and Future Freshwater Use in the United States - A Technical Document Supporting the 2000 USDA Forest Service RPA Assessment (Paperback)
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Loot Price R340
Discovery Miles 3 400
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Water withdrawals to cities, farms, and other offstream uses in the
United States have increased over ten-fold during the twentieth
century in response to tremendous population and economic growth.
Further rapid growth in population and income is almost certain to
occur, placing additional demands on water supplies. As withdrawals
to offstream users increase, more water is consumed, leaving less
water in streams. Streamflows have dropped at the same time as
additional instream uses have been found by scientists studying the
needs of aquatic plants and wildlife and the hydro-geologic
requirements of river channels themselves, and as rising incomes
and urbanization have intensified calls for maintaining water-based
recreation opportunities and protecting water quality (Gillilan and
Brown 1997). These changes amplify the importance of examining the
future adequacy of the nation's water supply. As Congress
recognized when it passed the Forest and Rangeland Renewable
Resources Planning Act of 1974 requiring the Forest Service to
periodically assess anticipated resource supply and demand
conditions, with sufficient forethought necessary adjustments may
be anticipated and unnecessary costs may be avoided. The adequacy
of a water supply depends on water availability compared with water
demand. This report focuses on water demand, and estimates future
water use assuming that the water will be available. Comparison of
water-use estimates presented in this report with estimates of
future water availability is left to a later report. In economic
terms, demand is a price-quantity relation. Unfortunately, such
relations are difficult to specify for some water uses and for
large geographic regions containing numerous market areas. Thus, an
economic model was not adopted for this study. Instead, demand, as
used in this report, refers to quantity requested. This
quantity-based approach leaves the effect of price unspecified but
not avoided. Because water and the resources needed to manage it
are scarce, price has played an important role in determining the
past quantities of water requested and will continue to do so. In
what follows, the implicit role of price must be remembered. Demand
for water differs by region. Arid areas have higher demands per
user than do humid areas, all else equal. Within a region of
homogeneous weather, demands differ geographically depending on the
availability of arable land, reliance on thermoelectric power, and
other factors. The many potential differences among geographic
areas suggest that demand for water should be studied at the
smallest geographical scale possible. However, existing small-scale
studies, often performed using different variables or methods, do
not lend themselves to broadscale conclusions about regional or
national trends. This report projects water demand to the year
2040. The time horizon was selected based on the Forest and
Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act, which mandates that the
Forest Service periodically prepare a management plan for a period
of roughly 45 years into the future. Of course, the likelihood that
a projection is accurate decreases as the time horizon of that
projection increases. The objective of this paper is to
characterize past and future water use in the U.S. A national
perspective is first adopted to present a basic understanding of
water-use trends. Then water use is described for large regions of
the U.S. to capture the major regional differences.
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