Rising Energy Prices, Water Demand by Peri-Urban Agriculture, and Implications for Urban Water Supply: The Tucson Case
Affiliation
Natural Resource Economics Division, USDAUniversity of Arizona
Issue Date
1978-04-15Keywords
Hydrology -- Arizona.Water resources development -- Arizona.
Hydrology -- Southwestern states.
Water resources development -- Southwestern states.
Costs
Cost-benefit analysis
Economic prediction
Economic justification
Water supply
Hydrologic budgetUrban hydrologyWater ratesGroundwater budgetPolitical constraintsLinear programmingIrrigation waterMunicipal waterCompeting usesLegal aspectsTucsonArizonaAssociated costsElectric power costs
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Copyright ©, where appropriate, is held by the author.Collection Information
This article is part of the Hydrology and Water Resources in Arizona and the Southwest collections. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science and the University of Arizona Libraries. For more information about items in this collection, contact anashydrology@gmail.com.Publisher
Arizona-Nevada Academy of ScienceAbstract
The city of Tucson, Arizona, the largest city in the U.S. to meet its water needs entirely from diminishing underground sources, is presently experiencing increasing water rates and the political turmoil associated with those increases. With focus upon this increasingly serious problem, production function analysis and static linear programming are used here to estimate the impact of rising energy prices on farm profits, cropping patterns and irrigation water used in the Avra Valley, a periurban irrigated region adjacent to Tucson, in an effort to evaluate the impact of this community upon Tucson 's municipal water demand. It is concluded that as energy prices increase and land is removed from agricultural production within the Avra Valley, Tucson 's economic position will be bolstered in at least three ways: (1) there will be more water available, (2) the price which the city must pay for farmland in order to gain control of the underlying water should be diminished and the quantity of farmland for sale increased, and (3) with fewer people involved in irrigated agriculture, legal conflicts between competing users will be diminished.ISSN
0272-6106Related items
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