Valuing water quality benefits from adopting best management practices: A spatial approach

Abstract

We developed a GIS-based tool that values, in a spatially explicit way, the ecosystem services generated by water quality improvements resulting from adoption of agricultural best management practices (BMPs). The tool is calibrated for watersheds in the Chesapeake Bay drainage and includes the benefits from water quality improvements within targeted watersheds, water quality improvements downstream from targeted watersheds, and reductions in pollutant loadings to Chesapeake Bay. The tool is used to investigate specific BMP scenarios adopted within specific watersheds. The results show that (i) BMP adoption generates large positive net benefits to society, with benefit/cost ratios ranging from 22 to 276; (ii) by selecting cost effective BMPs and placing them in the most appropriate places, the cost of meeting pollutant reduction targets would be reduced by 34-71%; and (iii) net benefits from BMP adoption are higher when they are implemented close to or upstream from population centers.

Determinants of Residents’ Willingness to Pay for Water Quality Improvements in Haikou, China: Application of CVM and ISM Approaches

“…Empirical research has shown that there are a variety of factors that affect WTP, such as age, education, gender, marital status, occupation, household income, and the number of household members [21,22]. Other factors such as awareness of environmental protection, the relative importance of the environment to the economy, the ages of children in the household, the level of transparency of information and participation in the decision-making process, and the need for water quality improvements can also influence WTP [15,23,24]. For instance, Guilfoos et al [25] discovered that there were discrepancies between people's perceptions of water quality and the actual number of bacteria present in the water samples collected from households.…”

Payments and penalties in ecosystem services programs

“…An acre conversion of cropland to grass cover in Queen Anne's County reduces annual nitrogen (N) and sediment (S) runoff by 13.5 lbs and 54.9 lbs with negligible increase phosphorus (P) runoff by 0.1 lbs from farm field to the Chesapeake Bay. We convert this pollutant loads reduction into monetary value using perpound social cost of each nutrient loads in the Bay: N: $14.96/pound, P: $181.61/pound, S: $0.37/pound in 2015 dollars (Choi et al, 2020). The estimated direct water quality benefits of 20 converting cropland to grassland in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, is then $225.35/acre per year in 2020 dollars using CPI.…”

An Integrated Assessment Model for Valuing Water Quality Changes in the United States

“…One of the few papers addressing incorporating distance decay in meta-analyses, , find that environmental improvements farther from respondents are associated with lower WTP values. See also Choi et al (2020) for an example of a distance-weighted WQI. For the purposes of this demonstration of the BenSPLASH model we specify a 160 km limit on WTP for water quality changes as our main model and test a 100 km limit as a sensitivity analysis.…”