Optimal management of a eutrophied coastal ecosystem: balancing agricultural and municipal abatement measures

Abstract

Agriculture and municipal wastewater are the principal sources of eutrophying nutrients in many water ecosystems. We develop a model which considers the characteristics of agricultural and municipal nutrient abatement. The model explicitly accounts for the investment needed to set up wastewater treatment facilities, and makes it possible to determine the optimal timing of investment as well as the optimal agricultural and municipal abatement levels. We apply the model to the Finnish coastal waters of the Gulf of Finland. Our results indicate that substantial savings in abatement costs and the damage associated with eutrophication could be obtained by constructing the facilities needed to process all the wastewaters entering the coastal ecosystem. The optimal timing of investment is shown to hinge on both the economic and ecological characteristics of the ecosystem.

Conditional Order-m Efficiency of Wastewater Treatment Plants: The Role of Environmental Factors

“…In 2015, it was estimated that the total volume of reused water in the EU amounted to 1100 Mm³/year, accounting for 0.4% of the annual EU freshwater withdrawals [7]. From this perspective, it is clear that the potential environmental improvement in today's context is one of the factors that justify the importance of analyzing the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) [8][9][10].…”

A Study of Climate Change and Cost Effective Mitigation of the Baltic Sea Eutrophication

“…Starting in mid 1990s there is by now a relatively large economics literature on cost effective or efficient nutrient load reductions to the Baltic Sea e.g. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], but most of these studies calculate cost effective or efficient allocation of abatement among the riparian countries in a static setting [8-10, 12-14, 17, 21].…”

“…A majority of the few studies accounting for nutrient dynamics considers only one marine basin, disregards the heterogeneity among marine basins, and/or restrict the number of nutrient related activities [15,16,10,18,19]. The focus is often on optimal nutrient management in one drainage basin including only agriculture [15,16] or this sector together with sewage treatment [10,18,19].…”

“…The focus is often on optimal nutrient management in one drainage basin including only agriculture [15,16] or this sector together with sewage treatment [10,18,19]. The only study covering the entire drainage basin of the Baltic Sea, accounting for coupled heterogeneous marine basins with respect to dynamics of both nitrogen and phosphorus, and including several nutrient-emitting sectors is [20].…”

Combating eutrophication in coastal areas at risk for oil spills

“…The Baltic Sea is a typical example of an international water body that has suffered from severe pollution for decades. Several deterministic studies have proposed least-cost or optimal solutions for nutrient abatement measures for the entire Baltic or some of its sub-basins (Byström 2000, Brady 2003, Gren 2001, Ollikainen and Honkatukia 2001, Elofsson 2003, Hart and Brady 2002, Laukkanen and Huhtala 2008. The analyses of Gren et al (2000), Elofsson (2003), Gren (2008) and Kataria et al (2010) have incorporated stochastic pollutant transports and agricultural loads, but the management of eutrophication in waters subject to other environmental threats, such as major oil spills, would require additional stochastic elements in the policy analysis.…”