NATURAL RESOURCE
ECONOMICS
NATURAL RESOURCE ECONOMICS
Sponsored by a Grant TÁMOP-4.1.2-08/2/A/KMR-2009-0041 Course Material Developed by Department of Economics,
Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest (ELTE) Department of Economics, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest
Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Balassi Kiadó, Budapest
NATURAL RESOURCE ECONOMICS
Author: Gábor Ungvári
Supervised by Gábor Ungvári January 2011
ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Economics
NATURAL RESOURCE ECONOMICS
Week 12
Residential communal services
Gábor Ungvári
• Providing drinking water
• Drainage and neutralization of wastewater
• Waste-management
• Relevance to energy use
• Options for local decision-making within the framework formed by centralized
departmental policy-making
Drinking water – Wastewater – The residential water cycle
• Water quality, in the case of surface water and subsoil reserves – VKI results
• Urban water consumption – sewerage system developed, but no decontamination.
• Decreasing water consumption in the country – nature has arranged this – this is a type of usufruct!
• Growing consumption of drinking water, urbanization – Contamination of groundwater reserves – water supply-sewage disposal gap
• “The land of leaking wastewater treatment plants”
• Wastewater neutralization programme coded as sewerage programme
• Central planning, centralized solutions – implementing urban infrastructure in the country
• Sewage drain – constant problems with surface water quality
• Is further improvement in the level of neutralization needed – Alternative sewage drain?
– Local ecological assimilation? – Use of land – is it possible / legal to implement notions on a regional level that are needed for ensuring communal use?
• Water-reserve management – using areas of aquifer protection – Typical Coase- problem
• Local and central levels in corporate environmental management
• The environmental problems of settlements manifest as departmental problems
• Independent services or integrated system?
• The question of accessibility / restrictedness of the local material and energy flows
• The connection between the complexity of the local economy and the
region's environmental cycle of system-maintenance processes – Small is attractive, but is it also effective?
• What are the drivers for individual local communal services and what kind of conditions do these establish for addressing local environmental issues?
• Developing co-operational systems would be advantageous. The providers have less interest in this, local actors lack the necessary knowledge, a the governmental level does not enforce long-term considerations, does not create a balance between the departmental lobby and the inadequate
expectations (Adapting laws without taking into consideration the domestic attributes).
Residential – Regional processes and the organization of services
• What is the size of the network? What technology?
How does it relate to the region’s waste and energy management?
• Considerations of economies of scale within the infrastructure
• The reallocation effect of the concentration of
network services – conflict of interest between the settlement and the network manager
• In relation to this, what does the regulation and
subsidizing environment look like?
Water Framework Directive
The Hungarian section of the Duna‘s water reservoir
