Grantee Research Project Results
2018 Progress Report: Valuation of Water Quality Change in Environment and Economy Context: Ecosystem Services across Gradients of Degradation and Local Economic Interest
EPA Grant Number: R836320Title: Valuation of Water Quality Change in Environment and Economy Context: Ecosystem Services across Gradients of Degradation and Local Economic Interest
Investigators: Swallow, Stephen , Vadas, Timothy M. , Towe, Charles , Kirchhoff, Christine , Helton, Ashley , Liu, Pengfei
Current Investigators: Swallow, Stephen , Vadas, Timothy M. , Kirchhoff, Christine , Helton, Ashley , Liu, Pengfei
Institution: University of Connecticut
EPA Project Officer: Packard, Benjamin H
Project Period: August 1, 2016 through July 31, 2019 (Extended to July 31, 2023)
Project Period Covered by this Report: August 1, 2017 through July 31,2018
Project Amount: $799,994
RFA: Water Quality Benefits (2015) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Water
Objective:
The proposed research aims to value changes in water quality via a preference function model designed explicitly for calibration and adaptation to alternative study-sites. The work will address critical deficiencies with broad applicability and application of traditional benefit transfer following three specific objectives. First, we will measure the relative value of water quality investments and stream ecosystem restoration in sites across the spectrum of degradation. Second, we will measure how the value of water quality and ecosystem restoration is affected by the context of where the streams are relative to current and past economic activity, especially jobs in pollution intensive industries versus other employment. Third, based on these primary studies we will use measures of personal environmental attitudes, measures of ecosystem/degradation context, and measures of local economic context to develop a framework guiding the applicability for transfer of benefits to alternative sites not directly studied.
Progress Summary:
We have preliminary completion of Phase 1: Site Selection and Sampling Phase within the first year of the project period. We have conducted a systematic, comprehensive literature review regarding water quality benefits to humans and the history and recent development in the benefit transfer. Currently, we are working on Phase 2: Focus Group and Survey Development phase of the project. We have developed a draft survey and continue to make revisions to the draft survey based on feedback obtained from several focus groups. We have planned a several more focus groups as we continue to finalize our survey instrument. Our goal is to develop a refined survey instrument that can be implemented in multiple counties to test approaches to benefit transfer in water quality valuation. In this report will not include our survey draft as it is still being continually revised. We will, however, update the survey development process based on the findings of our focus groups.
We have continued to refine environmental and local-economy gradients in the study region and have constructed a preliminary algorithm to select counties for the survey according to the environmental and local-economy gradients at a county level. Revisions are on-going as the investigators gain new insights from participants in focus groups being used for survey development. So far, we have revised our sampling strategy to ensure that our sampled communities are representative of multiple dimensions of water quality and socioeconomic gradient. In addition to an overall index for water quality, we create two sub-indices for water quality – index of ecological integrity and index of water quality developed using information for concentration levels of over 70 inorganic substances such as nutrients, chemicals, and metals as well as information on impaired stream length and permits for sewerage, industrial and stormwater pollution. Similarly, for socioeconomic gradient, overall socio-economic index is divided into two separate sub-indices, one related to wealth, income, employment, and demographics and another related to the proportion of employment in “clean” industries.
At this writing, we expect to use the constructed indices to choose study sites by randomly sampling one county within each cell in a 3 by 3 grid. We built a total of five planes each of which are divided into 3 by 3 grids. One plane for the aggregated water quality and socioeconomic index and 4 planes for 2 sub-indices each of water quality and socioeconomic gradients. One site is picked from each of the nice cells representing aggregated gradients for water quality and socioeconomic index ensuring that the sites are spread out evenly in all four spaces created using sub-indices.
Based on feedback from focus groups we have narrowed down the attributes used in our choice experiments to less than four major attributes from a list of over 15 attributes. The main attributes currently being used in our developing survey is standardized recreation score and wildlife score. Work is continuing on developing ways to communicate water quality attributes to potential respondents by linking these scores to the distribution of river or stream miles across various levels (score-ranges).
Although we’ll be focusing on a smaller set of attributes, we are working to develop a survey suitable to present respondents with our choice experiment questions so that the questions will capture willingness to pay (WTP) for the full distribution of water quality scale as opposed to just capturing the shift in the mean value of water quality improvement as is common in existing studies.
From our focus groups, we also concerned that the choice of payment vehicle can play an important role in eliciting individuals’ Hicksian willingness to pay (WTP) for water quality improvements. It seems to matter to people whether the water quality improvement programs are locally or nationally coordinated and the type of funding source for these programs. We will be administering a separate choice experiment to understand whether and how choice of payment vehicles affects individuals’ WTP for water quality improvements. One researchable question here is to develop a survey that allows the estimation of Hicksian WTP under payment vehicles that meet theoretical conditions for measuring the maximum tradeoff of respondents between money and water quality and other payment vehicles that allow estimation of WTP in a context that may correspond more consistently with how U.S. national-level water quality policy is administered through federal and state funding institutions. Developing these approaches is on-going.
Future Activities:
We will proceed according to the timeline established by the previously approved no-cost extension. We are in the process of conducting additional focus groups, drafting a pre-analysis plan for the hypotheses to be tested by our survey experiment. Based on the focus group feedback, we will continue developing the survey and sampling strategy for future implementation. We will carry out data analysis as original planned after we finish the survey experiments.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 5 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
ecosystem, regionalization, habitat, integrated assessment, public policy, decision making, community-based, conjoint analysis, observation, non-market valuation, contingent valuation, survey, preferences, public good, socioeconomic, willingness-to-pay, compensation, conservation, modeling, monitoring, analytical, surveys, measurement methods;Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.
Project Research Results
- Final Report
- 2022 Progress Report
- 2021 Progress Report
- 2020 Progress Report
- 2019 Progress Report
- 2017 Progress Report
- Original Abstract