ollutants as new products and processes are developed. Evaluation It is likely that the challenges arising from the environment are going to be substantial. While pollution abatement in developed countries has been successful in arresting decline it has added substantially to the costs of providing the appropriate level of water services. This is now possibly the greatest single driver, particularly in the EU. The full economic cost of these measures is not generally borne by the customer and as fiscal demands on governments increase these will have to be passed on to customers. In the developing world the emphasis is likely to be on the provision of infrastructure to meet basic needs with expensive pollution abatement measures necessarily foregone, although with certain technologies this may be better controlled. Thus there will be a need to develop cheap, cost-effective means of reducing pollution in parallel with appropriate technologies. Climate change presents some very severe challenges. Not only will the security and certainty of water resources decline but their vulnerability will increase as well. Added to this is the likelihood that infrastructure itself will be increasingly vulnerable to damage arising from sea level rise and flooding, storm damage, flash floods and the accentuation of seasonal effects such as winter flooding and summer droughts. All these pose major challenges to the robustness and resilience of water services and will place increasing numbers INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 5. THE IMPACTS OF CHANGE ON THE LONG-TERM FUTURE DEMAND FOR WATER SECTOR INFRASTRUCTURE of people at risk. In agriculture, effective irrigation will be an essential goal. This should be accompanied by changes in the crops being produced in water-stressed areas, in order to minimise the need for the exploitation of new resources; the latter are in any case unlikely to be readily available at a price that agriculture can afford if it bears the e