TY - JOUR
T1 - Decision support system for economic assessment of water improvements in remote, low-resource settings
AU - Abramson, Adam
AU - Lazarovitch, Naftali
AU - Massoth, Sylvie
AU - Adar, Eilon
N1 - Funding Information:
We wish to thank the Grace & Hope Charitable Trust as well as the Kreitman School for Advanced Graduate Studies Post-doctoral Scholarship for financial support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2014/12/1
Y1 - 2014/12/1
N2 - Since most people without access to safe water services live in remote areas of developing countries, assessing the economics of rural water developments poses a globally pressing challenge. This study seeks to: (1) outline the rural (non-networked) water development decision process in a systematic way; (2) incorporate that process into a modeling tool in order to conduct consistent economic analysis of developments across a wide range of contexts, and (3) assess the performance and potential applications of this tool. We introduce AWARE, a recently developed Decision Support System, to provide a generalized model of the processes and constraints related to the advancement of rural water services. AWARE enables robust comparisons to be made across a wide range of social, economic, physical, technical and management approaches. We demonstrate that it performs adequately, and propose that, despite its generalized approach, it will be useful for informing both development strategies and field projects.
AB - Since most people without access to safe water services live in remote areas of developing countries, assessing the economics of rural water developments poses a globally pressing challenge. This study seeks to: (1) outline the rural (non-networked) water development decision process in a systematic way; (2) incorporate that process into a modeling tool in order to conduct consistent economic analysis of developments across a wide range of contexts, and (3) assess the performance and potential applications of this tool. We introduce AWARE, a recently developed Decision Support System, to provide a generalized model of the processes and constraints related to the advancement of rural water services. AWARE enables robust comparisons to be made across a wide range of social, economic, physical, technical and management approaches. We demonstrate that it performs adequately, and propose that, despite its generalized approach, it will be useful for informing both development strategies and field projects.
KW - Cost-benefit analysis
KW - Decision support
KW - Low-resource settings
KW - Water development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84907693481&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.08.028
DO - 10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.08.028
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84907693481
SN - 1364-8152
VL - 62
SP - 197
EP - 209
JO - Environmental Modelling and Software
JF - Environmental Modelling and Software
ER -
