In an arid country like Kuwait with harsh and hot climate conditions, the scarcity of fresh water supplies presents a serious threat to sustainable socio-economic development and growth. Kuwait is an oil rich country with capital abundance and coastal locations enabled it to build desalination plants for fresh water production that is sold to the customers at highly subsidized prices. However, ...

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...

Increased water scarcity implies that residents of arid, heavily populated regions of the U.S. will have to increase water conservation or else face the consequence of water shortfalls. Voluntarily conserved water is an impure public good since it is non-excludable and rival in consumption. This means that water conservation benefits are subject to free-riding behavior. This paper considers a d...

Targeting of agricultural conservation practices to the most effective locations in a watershed can promote wise use of conservation funds to protect surface waters from agricultural nonpoint source pollution. A spatial optimization procedure using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool was used to target six widely used conservation practices, namely no-tillage, cereal rye cover crops (CC), filter...

Ensuring a nation's long term water supply requires the use of both supply-sided approaches such as water augmentation through water recycling, and demand-sided approaches such as water conservation. Conservation behavior can only be increased if the key drivers of such behavior are understood. The aim of this study is to reveal the main drivers from a comprehensive pool of hypothesized factors...

Conservation psychology models include certain personal characteristics, experiences, attitudes and beliefs as predictors of conservation. We propose that a concept from evolutionary psychology, called the K-Factor, may provide the theoretical groundwork for a unifying theory of proenvironmental behavior, incorporating and connecting many predictors from existing conservation literature. The K-...

A modeling framework consisting of a farm-scale model, Agricultural Policy Environmental Extender (APEX); a watershed-scale model, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT); and databases was used in the Conservation Effects Assessment Project to quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices on cropland. APEX is used to simulate conservation practices on cultivated cropland and Cons...