Impact/Purpose:

In an adaptive ecosystem-based management framework, it is important to understand not only the biophysical need for ecosystem restoration, but also the capacity of the community to adopt these changes. All ecosystem-based management priorities are influenced by societal values. Our larger project will develop a framework for using qualitative information to estimate ecosystem service benefits from urban restoration. This project will provide important information for this effort regarding social and behavioral factors relating to urban restoration, an area that has not been well-studied.

Description:

Degraded urban streams are not only characterized by poor local water quality and quantity, but also can export excess nutrients and sediments to sensitive downstream estuarine systems. Restoration of wetlands and riparian areas is one of a suite of “green infrastructure” practices to help reduce velocity of overland flows and bank erosion and increase nutrient retention. Much current research at EPA is focused on gains in sustainability that may be provided by green infrastructure approaches over engineered “gray” approaches (see http://water.epa.gov/infrastructure/greeninfrastructure/index.cfm). Green approaches are sometimes less expensive, and also provide many co-benefits in the form of ecosystem services, and thus may lower the total social costs of environmental improvements (U. S. EPA., 2012). Also, where water quality impairments are significant, traditional gray approaches alone may not achieve the necessary level of water quality improvements, or their costs may approach levels that are not affordable by the urban populations required to pay for them. This is an issue in the Providence, Rhode Island area, which includes the Woonasquatucket watershed, where the costs of combined sewage overflow and tertiary treatment methods required to meet nutrient targets for Narragansett Bay are projected to reach levels that could exceed 2 percent of median income for sewer rate-payers (Uva, 2012). Thus, green approaches are becoming even more valuable as part of a whole-systems approach to achieving needed environmental improvements. EPA regional offices often work with states, municipalities, and NGOs to assist them in developing strategies to meet water quality objectives in particular watersheds. EPA regional offices and their state partners are actively encouraging green infrastructure approaches to supplement increasingly costly and difficult to implement gray approaches. An understanding of the full range of benefits and co-benefits from green infrastructure approaches can support decisions regarding whether and how to spend public funds on restoration within a watershed. Evaluation of co-benefits will also help local or regional resource managers and NGOs obtain increasingly scarce funding for restoration projects. Most urban watershed managers and regional EPA offices do not have the resources to conduct dollar valuation to evaluate implementation of green infrastructure. Yet, understanding the economic benefits of restoration within a watershed, even in qualitative terms, can add important information to evaluation of policies and actions. Our research aims to provide an approach to developing non-dollar benefit indicators of the ecosystem services provided by urban wetlands and riparian buffers. In our overall project—A Decision Support Approach for Evaluating the Ecosystem Services and Social Benefits from Urban Wetland and Stream Buffer Restoration—we will develop an indicator-based approach to evaluating ecosystem services and benefits provided by freshwater wetlands restoration, which links to a functional wetlands assessment methodology initially developed for RI state managers (Golet et al., 2003; Miller and Golet, 2001). While there are many existing wetlands functional assessment tools (e.g, Wetland Evaluation Technique (WET), Habitat Evaluation Procedures (HEP), Hydrogeomorphic Method (HGM)), they typically do not estimate ecosystem services and benefits explicitly. Furthermore, neither the available wetlands functional assessment tools nor the tools available for environmental cost-benefit analyses are routinely used at the state or local level, because of their complex data requirements. Our approach will relate the wetlands functions in the Miller and Golet tool to categories of ecosystem services produced or supported by those functions, and will provide criteria for developing indicators of the social benefits from those ecosystem services. The goal of the overall study is to develop a practical approach to be used by managers or other decision makers when evaluating restoration potential, benefits, and feasibility. A primary objective of the research is to advance methods for developing and applying non-monetary indicators of non-market economic values, and thus will build on existing approaches in the literature (Banzhaf and Boyd, 2005; Boyd and Wainger, 2002; King et al., 2000; Wainger et al., 2010; Wainger et al., 2001). The criteria for these benefit indicators will be based on economic theory of supply and demand, and will incorporate the following factors that affect economic value: scarcity, availability and cost of substitutes, availability and cost of complements, diminishing marginal utility, elasticity of demand, extent of the market, and expected value over time. Yet, understanding benefits alone does not ensure that projects will be successfully implemented. The success of these efforts, on both private and public lands, often depends upon public buy-in and support. Research has shown that the adoption of restoration practices on private land and support for restoration on public land is influenced by a number of technical, financial, and social factors (Hersha et al., 2012; van Marwijk et al., 2012). And while the social barriers to riparian restoration have been well-studied in rural agricultural settings, less is known about social barriers in suburban and urban settings (Armstrong and Stedman, 2012; Dutcher et al., 2004; Wagner, 2008). Current work shows that perceptions vary, both from place to place (Asah et al., 2012; Brierley et al., 2006; Wagner, 2008) and by land use type (agricultural, urban, suburban) (Barbosa et al., 2012; U.S. EPA, 1994). Therefore, to support the broader project of developing an indicator-based approach to evaluating ecosystem services and benefits provided by freshwater wetlands restoration, this sub-project uses interviews and focus groups to explore public perceptions of services and disservices associated with restoration of riparian areas and wetlands in an urban setting, focusing on the Woonasquatucket Watershed in Rhode Island. The Woonasquatucket River watershed is a small basin (HUC-12, ~50 square miles) that flows from mixed suburban and agricultural settings in its headwaters into highly urbanized neighborhoods downstream. It encompasses portions of eight municipalities, whose residents comprise a wide range of demographics. A very active watershed organization (the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council) has helped to implement a number of riparian restoration projects throughout the watershed, but these have met with varying degrees of community support. Some efforts to revegetate denuded stream banks in the watershed have met with resistance from local citizens. Often, in an urban area, public green spaces are scarce, and different ways of managing these spaces can provide different mixes of ecosystem services. The ecosystem services provided by public lands are subject to conflicting preferences by members of the public. For example, a vegetated buffer along a public waterway may provide water quality and flood risk reduction benefits, which are likely to be highly valued in areas where water quality is impaired and flooding has occurred in the past, such as the Woonasquatucket Watershed. Yet, local residents may also hold conflicting preferences, or some benefits may accrue to downstream residents while those upstream may perceive a disamenity. Watershed residents have, in at least one case—regarding the Pleasant Valley stream—expressed a preference for mowed grass along the riverbank rather than a vegetated buffer, perceiving vegetated buffers as providing disamenities. In the Pleasant Valley case, some residents expressed opposition to a vegetated buffer because they felt that vegetated buffers may become an eyesore by collecting trash and may also be habitat for vermin. These same people, however, may value flood protection and water quality benefits, though they may not be fully aware of the tradeoffs they are expressing in their opposition to vegetated riparian areas. This study will examine public perceptions of the economic, social, and aesthetic benefits and drawbacks of restoration efforts in the Woonasquatucket watershed. A primary purpose of this portion of the overall project is to understand public preferences for vegetated buffers on public land in an urban area, including the public’s understanding of and values for flood risk reduction and water quality benefits, and how these may or may not conflict with aesthetic preferences and other perceived services and disservices. This research will apply methods from other social sciences, e.g., communication and human geography, to inform the overall economic analysis of ecosystem service benefit indicators for wetland and riparian restoration. By combining and coordinating approaches, we hope to provide managers and other watershed decision makers with a more complete picture of both the factors that make restoration socially beneficial and the public’s behavioral barriers and supports for restoration. We will begin by conducting one-on-one or small group interviews of natural resource managers and organizational stakeholders about the watershed, their impressions of public attitudes toward restoration efforts, and their concerns about communicating with the public. We will then conduct focus groups with members of the general public to better understand their attitudes towards and perceptions of restoration efforts on public land. The goal of these interactions will be to better understand the socio-cultural drivers of support for or opposition to implementation of restoration, and community members’ perceived benefits from restoration. The information collected will be analyzed using standard methods of qualitative data analysis (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011; Patton, 2002; Saldana, 2009). The preference information gathered from these focus groups will be incorporated into the larger project in two main ways. First, it will inform the creation of ecosystem service categories included in the indicator approach and the measures selected as indicators of benefits from those services. Second, it will inform communication efforts with watershed citizens regarding the full range of services and benefits, including the more apparent and easily recognized services such as aesthetics and the less apparent but also valuable services such as downstream water quality improvements. The results of this study will be shared with local and state watershed managers and NGOs who can use the approach to make management decisions in the watershed that account for the economic and social benefits and aesthetic preferences of watershed residents and to better communicate the restoration potential, benefits, and feasibility to the public.

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