Think-Tanks'Press

To prevent a water crisis in New Delhi, city dwellers are being asked to take up the socially responsible act of catching rain where it falls, known as rainwater harvesting.

A number of overlapping factors have led to the extreme groundwater extraction that is in evidence in New Delhi. Arid for much of the year, the water that is in circulation in New Delhi’s underground pipes is mostly sourced from inter-basin water transfers. The result is that the city’s water system is dependent on five rivers, and on the five states through which these rivers flow: Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Haryana.

Since the long-term availability of water from these rivers is in question because of rising population, agricultural demands, and the water-stressing effects of increasing temperatures, there are frequent political fights between the national capital and upstream states for the continued supply of water.

On 23 March 2019, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first official visit to Rome, Italy agreed to return 796 cultural relics to China.

This was the single largest return of Chinese cultural relics over the past 20 years, and the action spurred much nationalist sentiment among Chinese citizens, particularly online, being framed as another victory for a rising and more confident China on the international scene.

Spanning 5,000 years of Chinese history, the artefacts had been illegally exported to Italy in 2007.

Once returned, they were exhibited at the National Museum of China in Beijing from 24 April to 30 June 2019.

Jointly organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the National Cultural Heritage Administration, the exhibition was entitled “The Journey Back Home: An Exhibition of Chinese Artifacts Repatriated from Italy”.

Using a discrete choice experiment examining the potential role of domestic appliance curtailment contracts as a means of shifting load, this paper investigates potential drivers of preference heterogeneity with respect to electricity services.

Among the research findings are that almost 4-in-5 customers engage with the proposition of appliance curtailment contracts within the context of the survey environment.

From a policy perspective the results highlight the potential of appliance curtailment contracts as a tool to manage peak loads, as well as, the nature of preferences with respect to curtailment contract attributes.