The Cost of Air Pollution : A Case Study for the City of Cuenca, Ecuador
In 2010, the Municipality of Cuenca, through its environmental management commission (EMC), and the World Bank, through the environment and natural resources department, started a collaboration targeted towards strengthening EMC’s capacity to bette...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank Group, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/09/24862286/cost-air-pollution-case-study-city-cuenca-ecuador http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22579 |
| Summary: | In 2010, the Municipality of Cuenca,
through its environmental management commission (EMC), and
the World Bank, through the environment and natural
resources department, started a collaboration targeted
towards strengthening EMC’s capacity to better manage
Cuenca’s environmental assets and to provide EMC with hard
evidence and data that will serve as departing point for
decision-makers towards the formulation of public policy.
Two main areas of focus were chosen: (i) costs of
environmental degradation for Cuenca; and (ii) climate
change impacts and resilience measures for Cuenca. This
report describes the findings of the first area of focus.
This report tries to capture the main results and to
describe the assumptions and input data utilized, through a
detailed step-by-step description of an
internationally-accepted and validated methodology, an
explanation of input data needs, equations used, assumptions
made, and alternative calculation streams; and through the
demonstration of this methodology as it is applied to the
real case of air pollution in Cuenca. Analyses about the
cost of environmental degradation are often used as an
environmental priority-setting tool, because it gives the
estimated socio-economic costs of environmental degradation
(air pollution, inadequate water supply, sanitation,
hygiene, and others). In this report, the methodology was
used only for air pollution; similar studies can be
replicated for other areas in order to have a full
description of the different sources of pollution and the
subsequent costs that Cuenca is subject to. Economic
analysis (cost-benefit analysis) can be applied as a useful
tool to prioritize among these interventions options with
respect to their efficiency and cost effectiveness. Some
policy reforms may also require to understand the political
economy of reforms, for example, when taxi technology or bus
technology of private firms is to be changed. |
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