Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: Human health, ecosystem services, and their economic value as part of sustainability assessment for the Sacramento region
EPA Grant Number: R836938Title: Human health, ecosystem services, and their economic value as part of sustainability assessment for the Sacramento region
Investigators: Huber, Patrick , Hollander, Allan , Lange, Matthew , Miller, Daphne , Quinn, Jim , Riggle, Courtney , Srivastava, Lorie , Baker, Matthew
Institution: University of California - Davis
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: August 1, 2017 through July 31, 2019 (Extended to July 31, 2020)
Project Amount: $593,348
RFA: Integrating Human Health and Well-Being with Ecosystem Services (2016) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Human Health
Objective:
Systematic land use planning for sustainability does not typically include human health and well-being as explicit inputs. In this project, we test the effects of including issues related to human health, ecosystem services, and community wellbeing on the outputs of a standard land use planning process which is primarily focused on environmental variables.
This project convenes a new group of stakeholders that will augment the current group (focused on natural resources) to provide input on which issues and metrics are of greatest salience given the regional context. Ontologies are being developed that link these health and human wellbeing issues and metrics to existing ontologies describing links between agricultural and land use data types. Data will be gathered to support these metrics where available and gaps in data availability tracked.
These data will be used to undertake spatially-explicit land use optimization assessments using Marxan software under multiple future land use scenarios. Outputs from these assessments will be compared to those currently being developed as well as to existing general land use plans. Economic valuations of appropriate ecosystem services will be used to quantify these comparisons. A workflow is being developed to track the proposed project and ot make the methods available through California. We will work with stakeholders to apply our findings to a range of local use cases that could benefit from "health sensitive" land use planning and sustainability strategies.
The project will result in a regional stakeholder group that includes human health and well-being experts and advocates. The team will collaborate with the stakeholders to produce health-agriculture-environmental ontologies. A comparison between optimized land use patterns will be enabled across future land use scenarios and sets of sustainability issues analyzed. Economic valuation of ecosystem services will be assessed for the region under the land use modeling outputs. A generalizable workflow will be created enabling use of the methods developed here in other regions and states. Post-project use cases will also be identified for future funding opportunities.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
Major Research Progress/Results:
● We conducted a review of existing health and environment ontologies to use as a basis for linking the information in this project. A table of the result can be found below.
● We developed an ontology to describe the relationships between persons, programs, organizations, and datasets (PPOD; h ttps://github.com/adhollander/ppod) . This ontology was used to catalog the resources
● We used our team’s existing Sustainability Issues-Indicators ontology to establish formal links between both U.S. EPA’s EnviroAtlas and California’s EnviroScreen with a catalog of global sustainability issues and indicators gleaned from a collection of assessments and other sources (h ttp://asi.ice.ucdavis.edu/sustsource/catalog/).
● The team hosted three stakeholder meetings to assess natural resource planning needs in the region. We then conducted interviews with 24 regional health professionals to identify the important regional health issues and datasets. Finally, we hosted a last workshop that included both natural resource and human health stakeholders to review our work and provide feedback.
● Input from the stakeholders was used to develop five future land use scenarios that combined natural resources and health needs. A spatially-explicit prioritization analysis was conducted for each scenario using Marxan conservation planning software. Pairwise comparisons were used to identify the differences (i.e. trade-offs) between scenarios that prioritized different aspects of regional health needs.
● For each scenario, we conducted an economic analysis of two ecosystem service benefits/impacts: carbon sequestration, and air pollution. The economic valuations were used to compare the five future land use scenarios.
● Finally, we calculated an urban Greening Needs Index to identify urban areas in the six-county region that currently lack tree canopy, an increasingly-identified human health need. Our analysis focused on areas that have little current canopy, are at a distance from public open space, that have heavier pollution, and are home to disadvantaged communities.
Journal Articles on this Report : 1 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
| Other project views: | All 5 publications | 2 publications in selected types | All 2 journal articles |
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Huber P, Baker M, Hollander A, Lange M, Miller D, Quinn J, Riggle C, Tomich T. Linking Biodiversity and Human Wellbeing in Systematic Conservation Assessments of Working Landscapes. SUSTAINABILITY 2023;15(13):9912 |
R836938 (Final) |
Exit |
Relevant Websites:
Review of existing health and environmental ontologies
Ontology describing the relationships between persons, programs, organizations, and datasets (PPOD) Exit
Sacramento Region Sustainability Partner Finder Exit
Sustainable Sourcing Issue and Indicators Catalog Exit
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.