Public investment for the risk management of municipal water: Evaluation and decision making

Water contamination risk has become more complicated and more uncertain. The difficulty of specifying the causality between water contamination and its sources makes it hard for the water service authorities to manage the risk; where the safety level of water quality should be set and how much should be spent for the risk reduction. Our paper focuses on the public decision-making on the risk management investment for municipal water quality by combining the economic evaluation method for risk and the research on the risk perception about municipal water. The authors present a model of economic evaluation of risk and lay out its extensive expression to evaluate a project. They consider the relation between risk perception and the estimate. Using questionnaires, they survey the risk perception of drinking water to evaluate the high water purification system investment