Using data and art, new study helps to determine how much people are willing to pay for improved watershed quality

Researchers used visual and textual descriptions when asking survey participants
about watershed quality. (University of Wisconsin illustration; click on it to enlarge)

How much are people willing to pay for a healthier watershed? More than researchers thought, a new study from the University of Wisconsin found. UW researchers teamed up with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop and use "a method to gauge the value of improvements in watersheds protected by the federal Clean Water Act. Their results, which surveyed thousands of residents of three major river watersheds in the United States, were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," reports Chris Barncard of UW News.

Daniel Phaneuf, a UW professor of agricultural and applied economics and an author of the new study, told Barncard, "From the perspective of economics, human well-being can be generated by a lot of different things. At a fundamental level, we're interested in measuring how much households are willing to trade off spending on other things in order to have better environmental quality."

To design practical research tools, study researchers worked with ecologists using data from 19,000 sites across three river basins— the Upper Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee rivers--their goal was to clearly "show" study participants what scientists meant by watershed "improvement." Phaneuf told Barncard: "We wanted this to be meaningful and understandable to everyone, so we didn't use technical terms like 'biological condition gradient.' We worked with ecologists and graphic artists to create ways to represent these differences in biodiversity and visual conditions and the sort of human activities — like boating, swimming or finishing — each level of the BCG may actually represent."

"Along with watershed maps, the researchers took visual and textual descriptions of the stepwise differences in levels of ecological integrity to a survey group of 2,000 households across the river basins, presenting each one with maps describing current conditions in watersheds both in their area and farther away and maps describing improvements from potential remediation projects in those areas," Barncard explains. "They asked an overarching question for each cleanup scenario: How much more would you be willing to pay in taxes every year — ranging from $20 to $750 — to make this improvement happen?"

The healthier the watershed improvements would be, the more residents were willing to pay. "Respondents were willing to pay about $300 annually for one-level improvements in BCG in a nearby watershed, pushing closer to $500 if the changes would meet a Level 2 designation—a swimmable waterway just one step away from a natural state," Barncard reports. Phaneuf told him: "That's not so much of a surprise. People put a lot of value on the watersheds they get to see and enjoy. What may be a surprise, though, is that people are willing to pay even when it's not in their backyard. That is something that the EPA is quite interested in."