desalination and alternative water-shortage mitigation options in israel a comparative cost analysis海水淡化和替代缺水缓解选项在以色列比较成本分析.pdfVIP

J. Water Resource and Protection, 2010, 2, 1042-1056 doi:10.4236/jwarp.2010.212124 Published Online December 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jwarp) Desalination and Alternative Water-Shortage Mitigation Options in Israel: A Comparative Cost Analysis 1 1 2 Nir Becker , Doron Lavee , David Katz 1 Department of Economics and Management, Tel-Hai College, Upper Galilee, Israel 2Recanati School of Management and Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel E-mail : nbecker@telhai.ac.il, doron@pareto.co.il, katzdl@post.tau.ac.il Received September 18, 2010; revised October 20, 2010; accepted November 21, 2010 Abstract Costs for seawater desalination have dropped significantly over the past decade due to technological ad- vances. This has increased the attractiveness of desalination to policy-makers as a means to address water supply shortages. Israel, a country that faces chronic water scarcity, is in the process of developing wide- scale desalination capacity that is projected to supply all of the nation’s domestic water use within a few years. Two issues are often neglected, however, by policy-makers pursuing desalination. The first is that seawater desalination is associated with a number of external costs, consideration of which may influence the optimal scale and timing of desalination implementation. The second is that alternative measures for manag- ing water scarcity, including conservation techniques, are often more cost-efficient. This study estimates the full cost of desalination in Israel, including externalities, and then compares this to the costs of several alter- native opti