TEDx Video: Paying Water Rights Holders to Conserve Water

http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_harmon_how_the_market_can_keep_streams_flowing.html

Video with speaker Rob Harmon about utilizing a market method to allow water-using companies like breweries a way to buy water rights from water right holders.  The idea is that rather than using water whether they need it or not to maintain their water rights over the years, right holders are allowed to leave the water in the stream/river and maintain their water rights.

Sounds a lot like the carbon credit market (though I only have a basic understanding of that).

Good video, Kane.

I too do not understand the mechanisms totally for this type of system.  I do question when there is money to be made whether or not there is room for abuse.  Carbon credits have a way of allowing those who want to continue to produce more carbon pay for it and not make the necessary upgrades or investment into carbon reduction.  This approach sounds like the one where the government pays farmers to not grow certain crops and allow the fields to remain fallow.

I the light of a lack of a better solution, this may be a good idea.  I would like to see more of how this works and how this would lead to conservation in a meaningful way.

I do pay for my water and if i use less, I pay less.  That is an incentive to conserve.  On that level, I am familiar with monetary incentive.  Since I pay the water utility, which is regulated, for my water, it makes sense.  If I am paying a rights holder, then it could become a gray area of what the market will bear pricing and profiteering, should climate issues shrink the water supply further.

All complicated stuff in my estimation, and I find it hard hard to wrap my head around it.  Still, at the very least, there are people thinking of solutions.

Al Loria wrote:
Carbon credits have a way of allowing those who want to continue to produce more carbon pay for it and not make the necessary upgrades or investment into carbon reduction.

I think this is my biggest problem with the credit system.  It's great that water is being conserved in that particular creek, but is it really being conserved if it's just used elsewhere?  If the system is rolled out nationwide, does a heavy water user in Arizona get to buy water credits from someone in the Pacific Northwest, while still carrying on with an ecologically hazardous existence?

know what hit me today??? I was envisioning all the bottled water that will go from the US to Japan, for the Japanese and for our soldiers there, and thinking....that Japan is not the proper place for American water to end up..in bottles..

sure they need it..but it is going from our aquafers to someone elses aquafers that are full of toxic stuff..that will never be safe again..

yikes.

hold on to what you have