Grantee Research Project Results
2020 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, 2019 through July 31,2020
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:
To date, we have completed Phase 1: Site Selection and Sampling Phase and Phase 2: Focus Group and Survey Development. We conducted 2 additional focus groups, which helped us finalize our survey instrument. These focus groups provided insight regarding the final presentation of our choice questions and framing presentation to establish a common understanding of the environmental goods being considered by respondents.
Attributes for our choice experiments (valuation) questions include: Human Use Score, Ecological Integrity Index Score, a Breakdown of how river miles may change for these scores, and Location (Figure 1). Location can be in-county or out-of-county, relative to respondents’ home, with out-of-county locations distinguished as upstream, downstream, or disconnected from where the respondent’s home county.
Figure 1
Our final survey instrument includes three payment vehicles. The first two have involve a state legislature or the federal government raising additional taxes to pay for water quality changes. The third payment vehicle presents a voter-controlled policy motivated by how some states raise conservation funding through sales taxes that were approved by voters as an amendment to their state’s constitution, such that a state legislature could not redirect new taxes and fees away from water quality conservation. We anticipate that this payment vehicle will improve the correspondence between a respondent’s consideration of the stated cost (tax) increases needed to deliver a set of water quality changes and their maximum willingness to pay for such changes. The research team expects to test differences in estimated willingness to pay (environmental benefit measures) across the three payment vehicles.
To ensure that our sampled communities are representative of multiple dimensions of water quality and socioeconomic gradient, our sampling strategy selected a 20-county sample using three indices: index of Socioeconomic conditions, index of Ecological Integrity, and index of Pollution Economy. For the purpose of this study, we identified 5 clusters of counties (selected from 245 counties in our study region of MD, NJ, DE, PA, NY, CT, RI, MA, VT, NH, ME) that were similar across the indices; for robustness of our sampling we randomly chose 4 counties from each cluster (strata) to comprise our 20-county focal area.
Since our last report, we collected preliminary data using Facebook advertising. In 5 counties that are not part of the 20 counties identified for our final sample. The following counties were targeted using ads: Anne Arundel County, Hampden County, Lewis County, Putnam County, Luzerne County. Additional smaller (more rural) counties were added later in the pilot study in order to test how effective Facebook advertising would be in rural counties.
Following the experience of our the pilot effort, we are initiating 5 separate campaigns in Facebook to collect our data, one campaign for each of the 5 strata representing counties across the study area. Separate campaigns better enable us to assure sampling from rural counties, with low population density. Our pilot sampling had revealed that Facebook’s advertising policies likely oversample from densely populated, relatively urban counties.
During our pilot launch, 2 Ad types were tested (Figure 2). We found that the “Conserve This” ad type had a 30% higher click rate than “Your Voice Matters”. The Final sample will be collected using both paper mail (U.S. Post Office) and social media (Facebook advertising), creating sub-samples intended to facilitate an evaluation of response or non-response bias.
Figure 2
Future Activities:
In the next reporting period, we anticipate completing data collection and analysis to support project reports concerning water quality valuation, effects of payment vehicles, proximity to respondents’ residence, and evaluation of changes from the status quo or selection of more versus less degraded river segments as the focus for improvements to water quality.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 5 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
ecosystem services, regionalization, policy decision making, conjoint analysis, non-market valuation, contingent valuation, stated preferences, public good, willingness-to-payProgress 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
- 2019 Progress Report
- 2018 Progress Report
- 2017 Progress Report
- Original Abstract