Households' preferences for hydrological services in Veracruz, Mexico: The importance of outcomes vs. program design.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are transfer payments that incentivize natural resource owners and managers to carry out environmental conservation efforts that promote ecosystem service provision. A common issue that PES programs face is long-term financial sustainability. In the case of payments for hydrological services (PHS), this may be achieved by introducing fees in the water bill of water users and using the money to pay landowners to conserve their forests and the hydrological services they provide. However, these fees are often minuscule and chosen arbitrarily without assessing households' preferences for the outcomes and design of the programs that manage them. While programs that improve water quality and regularity are universally desired, we know less about household preferences for who administers the program and who is eligible to enroll. We design a choice experiment survey to study preferences for attributes of a PHS program in Xalapa and Coatapec, Mexico. Expectedly, both cities' residents are willing to pay more to support a PHS program that improves water quality and water quantity regulation. Trust in the municipal government in the case of Xalapa and watershed awareness in Coatepec increase the likelihood of selecting the proposed alternative PHS programs. Households in both cities are willing to pay a premium if an NGO is involved in managing the program. While residents of Xalapa prefer keeping the PHS program land eligibility restricted to forests, the residents of Coatepec are willing to pay significantly more for a program that expands land eligibility to include shade-grown coffee. Overall, the WTP for a PHS program is estimated to be 16% of the current average monthly water bill for Xalapa households and 70% of the current water bill for Coatepec households. Our findings suggest that downstream water users can serve as a viable option for financing a PHS program to conserve forestland upstream. Attention needs to be paid to differences in WTP magnitudes and the population characteristics that affect differences in WTP across cities, such as trust in the government and watershed awareness.

Decentralized water collection systems for households and communities: Household preferences in Atlanta and Boston.

Development of sustainable and resilient water infrastructure is an urgent challenge for urban areas to secure long-term water availability and mitigate negative impacts of water consumption and urban development. A hybrid system that combines centralized water infrastructure and household decentralized water facilities, including rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling, may be a solution to more sustainable and resilient water management in urban areas. Understanding household and community preferences for decentralized water facilities is important to inform the design and ultimately the promotion and adoption of such systems. In this study, we conducted a discrete choice experiment, via Amazon Mechanical Turk, to collect data on household choices of different decentralized water facility designs in two U.S. cities, Atlanta, Georgia and Boston, Massachusetts. Based on the responses to the choice experiment, we then developed a latent-class choice model to predict households' preferences of decentralized system design features and examine the influence of socioeconomic and personal characteristics on heterogeneous class membership. We identified six major classes of preferences in Atlanta and Boston, respectively, and evaluated how readily each class is likely to choose a decentralized water facility. Atlanta and Boston have some classes sharing similar preferences for decentralized water systems, but the socioeconomic and personal characteristics of these classes in the two cities are different. We found that the early adoption of decentralized water facilities is positively related to neighbors' adoptions and pressure of water scarcity increases households' willingness to share a decentralized facility. The visualization of spatial distribution of the classes highlighted early demand of decentralized water facilities is likely to emerge in low-property-value communities, which creates a unique opportunity for introducing decentralized water facilities during water infrastructure renovations. Our study provides a framework through citizen engagement to understand social demand and to inform the promotion of decentralized water facilities.

Falling-incident detection and throughput enhancement in a multi-camera video-surveillance system.

For most elderly, unpredictable falling incidents may occur at the corner of stairs or a long corridor due to body frailty. If we delay to rescue a falling elder who is likely fainting, more serious consequent injury may occur. Traditional secure or video surveillance systems need caregivers to monitor a centralized screen continuously, or need an elder to wear sensors to detect falling incidents, which explicitly waste much human power or cause inconvenience for elders. In this paper, we propose an automatic falling-detection algorithm and implement this algorithm in a multi-camera video surveillance system. The algorithm uses each camera to fetch the images from the regions required to be monitored. It then uses a falling-pattern recognition algorithm to determine if a falling incident has occurred. If yes, system will send short messages to someone needs to be noticed. The algorithm has been implemented in a DSP-based hardware acceleration board for functionality proof. Simulation results show that the accuracy of falling detection can achieve at least 90% and the throughput of a four-camera surveillance system can be improved by about 2.1 times.