The Value of Water—Estimating Water-Disruption Impacts on Businesses

Abstract

As water serves as a necessary and often irreplaceable input in a range of goods and services, a disruption in water supply can cause lost production and sales for businesses. Thus, large benefits may be generated by reducing the risk of water disruptions. To enable selection of economically viable risk mitigation measures, the investment costs should be weighed against the benefits of risk mitigation. Consequently, quantitative estimates of the consequences of disruptions need to be available. However, despite the importance of water to businesses, the literature on their financial losses due to short and long-term water disruptions is still scarce. The aim of this paper is to estimate time-dependent water supply resiliency factors for economic sectors, i.e., a metric focusing on the level of output that businesses can uphold during a disruption, to contribute to better decision support for water supply planning and risk management. An online survey was used to gather data from 1405 companies in Sweden on consequences of complete and unplanned water supply outages. Results show that Food and beverage Manufacturing and Accommodation and food services are the two most severely affected sectors over all analyzed disruption durations.

Infrastructure availability and disruption levels on performance of firms: a survey of Sub-Saharan Africa informal enterprises

“…That is, the effects are low during periods of low business activity but very high during high business activity periods. As evidenced in most studies, often it is the impact of the availability and disruption levels of infrastructure on firm performance that is studied (Selelo et al, 2017;Sjostrand et al, 2021) with very limited attention to the relationship that has on the internal capacity of firms. However, at the centre of problems faced by small firms is seasonality determining business activity levels, which is an important mediating factor.…”

“…For instance, some SMEs providing accommodation and restaurant services in Maun town often turned away clients during periods of extended water supply disruption as their facilities were inhabitable (Selelo et al, 2017). Water supply disruptions' effects on SMEs depend on the sector of the firm and subsequently degree of water usage in firms' service and production processes (Sjostrand et al, 2021). As a result, firms in food, beverages and tobacco manufacturing, accommodation and food supply services are the most affected sectors by water supply disruptions (Sjostrand et al, 2021).…”

“…Water supply disruptions' effects on SMEs depend on the sector of the firm and subsequently degree of water usage in firms' service and production processes (Sjostrand et al, 2021). As a result, firms in food, beverages and tobacco manufacturing, accommodation and food supply services are the most affected sectors by water supply disruptions (Sjostrand et al, 2021). All these studies give a better perspective on the impact of infrastructure weaknesses on operations (Mengstie, 2016), growth (Obokoh and Goldman, 2016), business competitiveness (Selelo et al, 2017) and enterprise profitability (Owusu et al, 2022) of SMEs in Africa.…”

Prioritising climate adaptation options to minimise financial and distributional impacts of water supply disruptions

“…(1) Literature that explores the economic, financial and welfare impacts of household water supply disruptions (Altaf 1994, Baisa et al 2010, Freire-González et al 2017, Roibas et al 2019, Jenkins et al 2021, including through the costly replacement from private tanker trucks (Bharti et al 2020, Yoon et al 2021. Economic and welfare impacts to customers can be captured through interviews and relatively small-scale surveys (Heflin et al 2014, Selelo et al 2017, Sjöstrand et al 2021. Such research is typically removed from the literature on climate risk to water supply systems, but rather focusses on non-climate related service intermittency (Grasham et al 2022a).…”

An Optimal Maintenance and Replacement Strategy for Deteriorating Water Mains

“…Usually, if the consequence of failure is of little concern, maintenance can be implemented after a failure takes place. On the other end, if the failure would bring about massive loss [4,5], then a preventive strategy is warranted. Other than these two extreme cases, how to optimize the managing strategies depends on a set of influencing factors, for example, deterioration of the mains, repair cost, replacement cost, consequence, readiness of repairing technology, pipe location, ease of access, municipal budget, citizen affordability upon break, flooding risk, etc.…”