Abstract: Globally, many inland lakes are shrinking due to water scarcity. In some arid regions, reduced runoff from irrigated agriculture is a leading contributing factor to lake shrinkage. As inland lakes contract, playa dust emissions from receding shorelines create regional air quality problems with associated negative effects on human health. A coupling thus exists between runoff from irrigated agriculture and pollution-health outcomes through inland lake extent. An original integrated hydro-agri-health-economic model is therefore developed to study water transfer tradeoffs between an agricultural sector and an inland lake. The model is applied to the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) and the Salton Sea, the largest inland lake in California, whose inflows are almost exclusively dependent on irrigated agricultural runoff. Under several IID water budget and dynamic health impact scenarios, we investigate the economic tradeoffs between using water as an input into the IID agricultural sector (thereby generating farm-level crop profits) or as an input into the Salton Sea (thereby reducing playa dust emissions and thus improving regional human health outcomes).
Speaker Bio: Jingjing Wang is an assistant professor of economics at the University of New Mexico specializing in environmental and natural resource economics. Her research focuses on the role of public policy in internalizing externalities and the performance of markets for efficient resource allocation in the context of environment, agriculture, and water. Wang received her B.E. in environmental engineering from Tsinghua University, China, and her M.S. in environmental science and Ph.D. in environmental and natural resource economics from the University of California, Riverside.