Impact/Purpose:

The goal of this research is to improve EPA’s ability to characterize recreational benefits of improved water quality in coastal communities and to understand barriers and opportunities for the implementation of alternative technologies for nutrient abatement. Currently, very little is known about recreational uses and values for and community-level attitudes towards waterbodies in New England’s coastal communities that, like Cape Cod and Suffolk County, Long Island (New York), are facing problems of nutrient enrichment primarily driven by non-agricultural nonpoint sources. This limits the EPA’s ability to assess the full economic and social impacts of nutrient enrichment.

Description:

New England’s coastal social-ecological systems are subject to chronic environmental problems, including water quality degradation. Researchers at EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) Atlantic Ecology Division (AED) are piloting an effort to further understand how reduced water quality due to nutrient enrichment is affecting and may affect the economic prosperity, social capacity, and ecological integrity of coastal New England communities. This research is part of task 4.61 of ORD’s Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program (Integrated Solutions for Sustainable Communities: Social-Ecological Systems for Resilience and Adaptive Management in Communities - A Cape Cod Case Study). Concurrent with this effort, AED researchers are participating in EPA’s three-office effort (Office of Research and Development, Office of Policy, and Office of Water) to quantify and monetize the benefits of water quality improvements across the Nation. AED’s effort is a case study of changes in recreation demand and values due to changes in nutrients in Northeastern estuaries and freshwater ponds. This work is part of task 3.04A of the Safe and Sustainable Waters Research Program (National Water Quality Benefits: Economic Case Studies of Water Quality Benefits). Because of the complementarity between the two projects, this Supporting Statement describes and requests hours for focus groups and interviews for both of these research efforts. Our initial focus for both efforts will be Cape Cod, Massachusetts (“the Cape”; Barnstable County), but may expand to the New England coastal area. Although there are a number of water quality concerns on Cape Cod, one of the key concerns is nonpoint sources of nitrogen, which leads to ecological impairments to fresh water ponds and estuaries, with resultant socio-economic impacts. The towns on the Cape are currently in the process of creating plans to address their total maximum daily load (TMDL) thresholds for nitrogen-impaired coastal embayments. There are over 40 coastal embayments and subembayments on the Cape. The EPA has approved 12 TMDLs for embayments on Cape Cod with a few pending review (Cape Cod Commission, 2015). The Massachusetts Estuaries Project estimates that wastewater accounts for 65 percent of the nitrogen sources on the Cape (Cape Cod Commission, 2015). Because Cape Cod’s wastewater is primarily handled by onsite septic systems (85% of total Cape wastewater flows), the main sources are spread across the Cape and are affected by individual household-level decisions as well as community-level decisions. Coordinated through the Cape Cod Commission and based on the Cape’s Clean Water Act Section 208 Plan, communities across the Cape have been tasked with developing a watershed-based approach for addressing water quality to improve valued socio-economic and ecological conditions. The decisions needed to meet water quality standards are highly complex and involve significant cross-disciplinary challenges in identifying, implementing, and monitoring social and ecological management needs. The Cape comprises 15 towns, each of which has unique freshwater ponds, small estuaries, and open-water beaches that are important drivers of the economy. Cape Cod has a year-round population of about 215,000 residents and a large seasonal population, estimated at more than 500,000, with around one-third of the housing stock owned by seasonal residents. The Cape’s economy is primarily tourism-based, with around 6 million tourists visiting each year and 41% of all jobs directly related to the tourist industry (Cape Cod Commission, 2014). Little is known about important water-dependent recreational values, and in particular, how water quality affects those values. Even less is known about how values and attitudes differ across year-round residents, seasonal residents, and tourists. Understanding the values and attitudes of these distinct groups of people will be important to determining the types of management actions that are likely to be most successful in addressing nutrient problems while maintaining the Cape’s economic vitality and maximizing social welfare. Part of our work will focus on the influences of nutrient enrichment on the uses of and attitudes towards the Cape’s waterbodies by four populations: year-round residents, seasonal residents, second-home owners who do not live in the home, and tourists. These populations influence the Cape’s economy in different ways and differ in their ability to affect decisions, in how decisions will affect their well-being, and in their willingness and ability to substitute away from the Cape in the face of declining water quality. Our research will begin by identifying critical ecosystem services in the different waterbodies that are important to the four types of community members, how nutrient enrichment is threatening those services, potential mixes of management actions (including established technologies such as sewering or nitrogen-removing septic systems; emerging technologies such as composting toilets and permeable reactive barriers; and “green” technologies such as living shorelines, wetlands, oyster reefs, and rain gardens), and potential improvements expected to result from implementing the TMDLs (to be done in collaboration with natural scientists on AED’s research team, EPA Region 1 staff, the Cape Cod Commission, and other partner researchers on the Cape). Based on this information, we will evaluate both economic values for potential improvements and public attitudes towards and acceptance of the different proposed technologies. We will focus on understanding recreational uses as valued commodities on the Cape (beach going, swimming, fishing and shellfishing, boating, for example). Additionally, we plan to compare the potential benefits of and barriers to adopting different types of technologies for nutrient abatement and climate change adaptation. Although there are many innovative and potentially less costly technologies available for nutrient abatement, little is understood about people’s support for and willingness to adopt alternative technologies. This research will allow us to better understand the possibilities for reducing potential economic and ecological impacts, the acceptability of different technologies, and the benefits of reduced community exposure to nutrient enrichment through recreation. Together, these research efforts seek to identify components of vulnerability and opportunities for improvement in a tourism-based social-ecological system threatened by nutrient enrichment and climate change. This Supporting Statement provides background material for a request to conduct 20 focus groups and 60 one-on-one interviews. The results from these activities will inform the design of a revealed preference survey instrument, but will not produce results that can be statistically analyzed. Additionally, these activities are an important first step in understanding recreational uses and attitudes of different groups of community members towards waterbodies on the Cape and the greater New England area, and exploratory analysis of the barriers and opportunities for alternative technologies for nutrient abatement. The interviews will provide more in-depth information from experts and engaged community members with various viewpoints. The interviews will be focused on 1) understanding barriers and opportunities for the adoption of alternative technologies for wastewater treatment on Cape Cod, 2) understanding the critical components of people’s sense of place in coastal communities, and 3) why specific waterbodies are chosen for recreational use. These interviews will provide valuable qualitative information to support the findings from the focus groups and surveys. Initial draft sample questionnaires for focus groups and interviews are attached. Additional materials for subsequent focus groups and a survey instrument will be developed based on initial responses.

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