Using Water Footprint Approaches to Estimate Water Demand in the Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya

The purpose of this paper is to estimate water demand for households in Lake Naivasha basin. This is important because water demand is increasingly significant to the policy of choice for achieving sustainable water management. Realization of sustainable water use is urgent in Lake |Naivasha water basin not only because of the unstable water volumes in the Lake which have wider wellbeing effects but also because of changing land use strategies that depend on higher water abstraction. Following Mokennen,et al., (2012) this study uses a water footprint approach to estimate the responsiveness of water use choices to changes in prices and income. Data is collected using questionnaires distributed to 418 residents in the lake basin. In this paper a double log water demand function is used to estimate household water demand. This approach has the advantage of providing paramters that are easily comparable with previous studies. The paper is, however, innovative in its application of estimated “total water abstraction” using water footprint approaches. An estimated water demand elasticity of 0.347 is only significant at p=0.01 suggesting a weak but significant impact of water cost on water abstraction choices. These results suggest the potential of applying price/fiscal instruments to enhance sustainable water abstraction within a water stress ecosystem.