Preferences for three nonconventional water resources or distributed water resources mainly in urban area - rainwater harvesting (RH), submersible groundwater (SG), and reclaimed wastewater (RW) - and their five usages - toilet flushing water (FW), sprinkle water (SW), environmental water (EW), water against disasters (DW), and water for agriculture and planting (AW) - of ordinary citizens and administrative officers were comparatively analysed on the basis of questionnaire survey results obtained by analytical hierarchical process (AHP), absolute evaluation and willingness to pay (WTP) determination. McNemar, average difference, and Welch examinations were used to evaluate the differences in the results. For the second set of criteria in AHP, the administrative officers' preferences were larger for stability (corresponding to 'society' in the first set of criteria, here and throughout), project cost and duration ('economics') and water environment ('nature') than the ordinary citizens' preferences. For water resources, the order of preferences was (1) RH, (2) RW and (3) SG for both administrative officers and ordinary citizens. For water usages, the preferences for DW and AW were comparatively larger than those for other usages. The administrative officers' public WTPs for 15 combinations of water resources and usages, i.e., 4,172-21,572 Japanese Yen person
-1 year
-1 (YPY), were mostly larger than the ordinary citizens' public WTP, i.e., 6,152-17,336 YPY. The administrative officers' private WTPs, i.e., 1,106-4,044 YPY, were mostly smaller than the ordinary citizens' private WTP, i.e., 2,561-5,934 YPY.
View full abstract