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socio-economic

Urban Planning

Definition

Within the framework of natural water retention measures (NWRM), urban planning refers to the application of the "Grey to Green" principle within cities. The specific focus of urban planning for NWRM is to achieve sustainable water management by mimicking natural functions and processes in the urban environment.

Transaction cost

Definition

Efforts (either monetary outlays or consumption of any other resources, such as time) of administering, monitoring, and enforcing a NWRM. Policy-making involves political costs that are absent in private exchanges.

Sunk cost

Definition

Those expenditures that, once committed, cannot be (easily) recovered. These costs arise because some activities require specialized assets that cannot be readily diverted to other uses.

Multiplier effect

Definition

Factor of proportionality that shows how much spending in a NWRM may induce direct or indirect changes in macroeconomic variables, such as income, employment, investment, etc. It is another way of referring to wider economic impacts of NWRM.

Equivalent Annual Cost

Definition

The cost per year of implementing a NWRM over its entire lifespan. EAC is used when comparing NWRMs of unequal lifespans. It is estimated through listing all capital expenditures and when they are incurred; calculating the net present value of expenditures, once discounted; and converting this net present value into an annuity

Externality

Definition

(either positive or negative). Third-party effect or welfare impact, which is both unilateral (i.e. one cannot decide neither whether to suffer it or not nor how much impact to bear), and non-compensated. In other words, an externality stemming from the implementation of a NWRM is a cost (if negative) or a benefit (if positive), which is not directly reflected in the direct costs or benefits of the NWRM but are one of its outcomes. It is a welfare variation expressed in monetary units.

Financial cost

Definition

The (monetary) value of resources deployed for the implementation of any NWRM, which includes upfront capital expenditures, either from new investments or the replacement of assets in past investments; depreciation allowances (annualised cost or replacing the accounting value of existing assets in the future); operating expenditures (those incurred to keep the NWRM running in an efficient manner); maintenance expenditures (for preserving existing or new assets in good functioning order throughout their useful life); and decommissioning costs (those incurred at the end of the lifecycle of the NWRM).