Richard Howitt is a professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics. He has published widely on agricultural and environmental resource allocation issues, with special emphasis on agricultural land use, water markets and the application of optimization models to resource allocation questions. He is a member of the Western Agricultural Economics Association of Environmental and Resource Economics and is a reviewer for seven scholarly journals. He is also a member of the Watershed Center's Delta Solutions Group, and is a co-author of the 2007 Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. His research interests include building computer models of how land and water are used, and their calibration to G.I.S-based data sets. He is currently engaged in an analysis of land use patterns in the Delta and in an assessment of potential economic outcomes for agriculture and recreation in the Delta's primary zone under different flooding and water quality scenarios.
Richard Howitt
Faculty, Emeritus
Summary
Published articles Show More
Agricultural Losses from Salinity in Californias Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
Published in San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science
Sea level rise, large-scale flooding, and new conveyance arrangements for water exports may increase future water salinity for local agricultural production in California\textquoterights Sacramento\textendashSan Joaquin Delta. Increasing salinity in crop root zones often decreases crop yields and crop revenues. Salinity effects are nonlinear, and v...
Calibrating dissaggregate economic models of agricultural production and water management
Published in Environmental Modelling & Software
This paper describes calibration methods for models of agricultural production and water use in which economic variables can directly interact with hydrologic network models or other biophysical system models. We also describe and demonstrate the use of systematic calibration checks at different stages for efficient debugging of models. The central...
Hydro-economic models: Concepts, design, applications and future prospects
Published in Journal of Hydrology
Future water management will shift from building new water supply systems to better operating existing ones. The variation of water values in time and space will increasingly motivate efforts to address water scarcity and reduce water conflicts. Hydro-economic models represent spatially distributed water resource systems, infrastructure, management...
Reports Show More
Misc. Show More
Economic Analysis of the 2015 Drought for California Agriculture
The drought is tightening its grip on California agriculture, squeezing about 30 percent more workers and cropland out of production than in 2014, according to the latest drought impact report by the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. In 2015, the states agricultural economy directly will lose about 1.84 billion and 10,100 jobs because of the ...
Economics of the Drought for California Food and Agriculture
The extreme drought that has gripped California over the past several years is causing onerous adjustments in the natural and human environments. Agriculture, which uses much of the states water, is at the center of many of these arduous responses. The 2015 impacts of the continuing drought are still underway, but in this special ARE Update issue, ...
Keeping Accounts for Groundwater Sustainability
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