Ecosystem services impacts associated with environmental reactive nitrogen release in the United States
Citation:
Compton, J., D. Sobota, AND J. Lin. Ecosystem services impacts associated with environmental reactive nitrogen release in the United States. International Nitrogen Initiative, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA, December 04 - 10, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Recent assessments of the costs and benefits of reactive nitrogen uses illustrate substantial impacts of nitrogen release to the environment on human health, recreation, tourism, fisheries and property values. These assessments connect the magnitude of N release from different sources, and tied these to specific estimates of damages associated with different forms and media by using the common metric of dollars per kg N. However, these approaches are best viewed as estimating the potential damages from nutrients because for many of the damages, in particular the aquatic damages, since they generally extrapolate cost functions developed for one area across a larger area. We use information presented in a recent EPA Office of Water report that assembled data on the documented costs associated with nutrient pollution in the US, and compare these actual costs with the potential costs estimated for HUC8 watersheds across the US by EPA ORD. This ground truthing of the cost data with actual measured costs for damages will allow us to compare these results spatially and allow us to determine whether hot spots for potential damages line up with the actual damages quantified in the EPA report. Decision makers use cost benefit analyses to evaluate the impacts of alternative policy choices and decisions, and improving the information base that contributes to these analyses can better inform the decision-making process. This work is a milestone of the Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program's Task 4.61.4 Integrated Nitrogen Management. The team includes an EPA-ORD scientist, an Office of Water experts on nutrient impact costs and two current and former post-docs with the National Research Council who are experts in watershed modeling and spatial analysis.
Description:
Nitrogen release to the environment from human activities can have important and costly impacts on human health, recreation, transportation, fisheries, and ecosystem health. Recent efforts to quantify these damage costs have identified annual damages associated with reactive nitrogen release to the EU and US in the hundreds of billions of US dollars (USD). The general approach used to estimate these damages associated with reactive nitrogen are derived from a variety of methods to estimate economic damages, for example, impacts to human respiratory health in terms of hospital visits and mortality, willingness to pay to improve a water body and costs to replace or treat drinking water systems affected by nitrate or cyanotoxin contamination. These values are then extrapolated to other areas to develop the damage cost estimates that are probably best seen as potential damage costs, particularly for aquatic ecosystems. We seek to provide an additional verification of these potential damages using data assembled by the US EPA for case studies of measured costs of nutrient impacts across the US from 2000-2012. We compare the spatial distribution and the magnitude of these costs with the spatial distribution and magnitude of costs from HUC8 watershed units across the US by Sobota et al. (2015). We anticipate that this analysis will provide a ground truthing of existing damage cost estimates, and continue to support the incorporation of cost and benefit information into communication, outreach, and decision-making related to nutrient pollution.