The value of water—estimating water-disruption impacts on businesses
Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 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

Författare

Karin Sjöstrand

Chalmers, Arkitektur och samhällsbyggnadsteknik, Geologi och geoteknik

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Josefine Klingberg

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Noor Sedehi Zadeh

Statens Väg- och Transportforskningsinstitut (VTI)

Mattias Haraldsson

Statens Väg- och Transportforskningsinstitut (VTI)

Lars Rosen

Chalmers, Arkitektur och samhällsbyggnadsteknik, Geologi och geoteknik

Andreas Lindhe

Chalmers, Arkitektur och samhällsbyggnadsteknik, Geologi och geoteknik

Water (Switzerland)

2073-4441 (ISSN) 20734441 (eISSN)

Vol. 13 11 1565

DRICKS 2021

Svenskt vatten (20-121), 2021-01-01 -- 2021-12-31.

Ämneskategorier

Vattenteknik

Nationalekonomi

Oceanografi, hydrologi, vattenresurser

DOI

10.3390/w13111565

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2021-12-16