The value of water—estimating water-disruption impacts on businesses
Journal article, 2021

As water serves as a necessary and often irreplaceable input in a range of goods and services, a disruption in water supply can cause lost production and sales for businesses. Thus, large benefits may be generated by reducing the risk of water disruptions. To enable selection of economically viable risk mitigation measures, the investment costs should be weighed against the benefits of risk mitigation. Consequently, quantitative estimates of the consequences of disruptions need to be available. However, despite the importance of water to businesses, the literature on their financial losses due to short and long-term water disruptions is still scarce. The aim of this paper is to estimate time-dependent water supply resiliency factors for economic sectors, i.e., a metric focusing on the level of output that businesses can uphold during a disruption, to contribute to better decision support for water supply planning and risk management. An online survey was used to gather data from 1405 companies in Sweden on consequences of complete and unplanned water supply outages. Results show that Food and beverage Manufacturing and Accommodation and food services are the two most severely affected sectors over all analyzed disruption durations.

Critical infrastructure disruption

Resiliency factor

Economic loss

Water supply outage

Risk mitigation

Business interrup-tion

Author

Karin Sjöstrand

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Josefine Klingberg

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Noor Sedehi Zadeh

The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)

Mattias Haraldsson

The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)

Lars Rosen

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics

Andreas Lindhe

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics

Water (Switzerland)

2073-4441 (ISSN) 20734441 (eISSN)

Vol. 13 11 1565

DRICKS 2021

The Swedish Water & Wastewater Association (20-121), 2021-01-01 -- 2021-12-31.

Subject Categories

Water Engineering

Economics

Oceanography, Hydrology, Water Resources

DOI

10.3390/w13111565

More information

Latest update

12/16/2021