Livestock and water pollution in Asia : analysis and modeling of causes, impacts and policy options in the Philippines

The aim of this study was to develop policy lessons for effectively and cost-efficiently reducing waste discharges and stream water pollution from livestock in developing countries in Asia. A major focus was to quantify links between potential pollution sources and stream water quality within a watershed framework in two case-studies sites in the Philippines. This led to the development of a bio-economic model to analyse policy options for reducing waste discharges and stream pollution from piggery enterprises. The study demonstrated that piggery and domestic outputs were significantly correlated with stream pollution throughout both study sites and were the dominant source of stream pollution in urban and peri-urban areas. The potential welfare impacts of piggery pollution were overwhelming. The heterogeneous geographical and sub-sectoral distribution of pollution sources, causes and impacts had important policy implications. The evidence showed that pollution control policies should be specifically tailored and targeted to the geographic areas, production zones, industry sectors and enterprise production scales where the greatest improvements in environmental quality and social benefit (effectiveness) are achieved at the lowest economic cost (cost-efficiency). Policy makers therefore require detailed information about the environmental, economic and social costs and benefits of pollution abatement and policy approaches. However equity and ethical considerations also need to be considered. The efficiency benefits of economic instruments such as charges, taxes and subsidies make these attractive policy alternatives to uniform environmental standards. However policy compliance instruments aimed at reducing diffuse pollution from livestock need to be based on easily measured proxies of waste discharges. It was also clear that water regulation and pricing reform are also a high priority.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo