Acidification Remediation Alternatives: Exploring the Temporal Dimension with Cost Benefit Analysis

Abstract

Acidification of soils and surface waters caused by acid deposition is still a major problem in southern Scandinavia, despite clear signs of recovery. Besides emission control, liming of lakes, streams, and wetlands is currently used to ameliorate acidification in Sweden. An alternative strategy is forest soil liming to restore the acidified upland soils from which much acidified runoff originates. This cost-benefit analysis compared these liming strategies with a special emphasis on the time perspective for expected benefits. Benefits transfer was used to estimate use values for sport ffishing and nonuse values in terms of existence values. The results show that large-scale forest soil liming is not socioeconomically profitable, while lake liming is, if it is done efficiently-in other words, if only acidified surface waters are treated. The beguiling logic of ''solving'' an environmental problem at its source (soils), rather than continuing to treat the symptoms (surface waters), is thus misleading.

Full papers

“…Consequently, a value of ash efficiency of 0.0 indicates a zero effect of ash on acidified lakes and streams (c.f. Bostedt et al 2010).…”

“…The standard price approach is based on the abatement costs of emission reductions as a proxy for revealed WTP for improvements in ecosystem health. In total the recreational and existence values sum to 1232 SEK 3 /hectare of surface water (Bostedt et al, 2010). The simulations in this study have been conducted using Plan33, a computer program for economic analysis for non-industrial forest owners (Ekvall, 2005;Ranius et al, 2005).…”

Chemical or Natural? Including LCA in Social CBA to Compare Remediation Alternatives for a Dry-Cleaning Facility

“…The fact that these benefits do not outweigh the societal costs would let us conclude that it is not socially beneficial to carry out the remediation. This is often the conclusion when assessing remediation projects [13,[40][41][42]. In spite of the remediation projects often being not socially beneficial, as a society we still continue to remediate contaminated sites.…”

Roadmap for Valuing Soil Ecosystem Services to Inform Multi-Level Decision-Making in Agriculture

“…The valuation of public-good ecosystem services is challenging, because these lack market prices as a source of objective marginal values. Instead one can turn to nonmarket valuation techniques that infer the value of changes in public-good ecosystem services from observing behavior on a related market, eliciting preferences through surveys or experiments [30] or preferences reflected in political decision-making [53]. For instance, the marginal value of carbon storage in soils could be derived from the potential damage costs of climate change [54] or the pricing of carbon through environmental taxes [55], and that of nutrient retention from citizens' willingness-to-pay to improve water quality [56].…”