A Watershed Approach to Improve Water Quality: Case Study of Clean Water Services’ Tualatin River Program1

Abstract

Cochran, Bobby and Charles Logue, 2011. A Watershed Approach to Improve Water Quality: Case Study of Clean Water Services’ Tualatin River Program. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(1):29‐38. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752‐1688.2010.00491.x Abstract: Over the last five years, Clean Water Services developed and implemented a program to offset thermal load discharged from its wastewater facilities to the Tualatin River by planting trees to shade streams and augmenting summertime instream flows. The program has overcome challenges facing many of the nation’s water quality trading programs to not only gain consensus on the frameworks needed to authorize trading, but also provide a broad range of ecosystem services. This paper compares the Tualatin case study with some of the commonly cited factors of successful trading programs.

Integrating multiple perspectives on payments for ecosystem services through a social–ecological systems framework

“…The shade benefits, however, rely on the modeled results since there is a significant lag of 20 years or more from the time of planting to the full realization of the ecosystem service (2RU2). The clearest outcome of this PES program was a cost effective way for CWS to meet its regulatory obligations (O1) since the utility only had to spend $4.3 million and was able to avoid building cooling towers estimated at $60 million to $150 million (Cochran and Logue, 2011). Ecological outcomes are also expected (O2) but uncertain due to the long time lag as well as the ecological complexity in understanding and ascribing observed changes to specific management or policy actions.…”

“…Facing the challenge of meeting regulatory compliance, the CWS leadership examined its options, which included building cooling towers or other engineered solutions to mitigate the temperature of their effluent at an estimated cost of between $60 million to $150 million (Cochran and Logue, 2011). Recognizing that the loss of shade provided by riparian forests was a major source of the stream temperature problem, CWS explored the possibility of developing a water quality-trading program in which CWS would pay for riparian restoration on private lands along the Tualatin River and its tributaries.…”

Bundling of ecosystem services to increase forestland value and enhance sustainable forest management

“…Other participants include water quality permitting authorities, third-party brokers, conservation organizations, watershed councils and private industry groups. Local examples of water quality trading include the EPA watershed-based permit for the Tualatin River in Oregon that allows trading to achieve the permit requirement for temperature (Cochran and Loque, 2011). Here, instead of installing refrigeration systems at two Tualatin River treatment plants (at a cost of $60 million), the wastewater utility paid upstream farmers to plant shade trees in the riparian areas (at a cost of $6 million).…”

Critical insights for a sustainability framework to address integrated community water services: Technical metrics and approaches

“…Starting with the environmental aspects illustrated in Fig. 1, there is a need to account for the many ecological processes and services that support human activities (Brauman et al, 2007;Cochran and Logue, 2011;Dodds et al, 2013). The natural components of the water systems include precipitation, land use, runoff, infiltration, evapotranspiration, surface water, and groundwater sources.…”