The Value of clean water: The public's willingness to pay for boatable, fishable, and swimmable quality water

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a study designed to determine the national benefits of freshwater pollution control. By using data from a national contingent valuation survey, we estimate the aggregate benefits of meeting the goals of the Clean Water Act. A valuation function is estimated which depicts willingness to pay as a function of water quality, income, and other variables. Several validation checks and tests for specific biases are performed, and the benefit estimates are corrected for missing and invalid responses. The two major policy implications from our work are that the benefits and costs of water pollution control efforts are roughly equal and that many of the new policy actions necessary to ensure that all water bodies reach at least a swimmable quality level will not have positive net benefits.

Valuing water quality improvements in the United States using meta-analysis: Is the glass half-full or half-empty for national policy analysis?

“…activities that would be supported with improved water quality (e.g., ''from boatable to fishable'' in Carson and Mitchell, 1993) then WQ_REC_USE equals 1. Roughly two-thirds of the estimates fall into this category.…”

“…One approach involves estimating the willingness to pay for reductions in one or more specific pollutants (e.g., Bockstael et al, 1987), which can be viewed as inputs in an ecosystem production function. The other approach involves estimating willingness to pay for enhancements to ecosystem services (e.g., suitable for swimming (Carson and Mitchell, 1993) or fish become safe to eat (Viscusi et al, 2004)), which can be viewed as outputs of an ecosystem production function.…”

Valuing preferences over stormwater management outcomes including improved hydrologic function

“…[8] Another line of work has estimated the value of surface water quality in rivers and streams [e.g., Carson and Mitchell, 1993;Van Houtven et al, 2007;Johnston et al, 2005;Whitehead, 2006] yet only a little of that research has been in urban or urbanizing areas [Bateman et al, 2006]. Some research has studied the values people place on dimensions of environmental quality in freshwater systems that are more complex than pollution levels [Loomis et al, 2000;Wilson and Carpenter, 1999].…”

“…However, a new generation of decentralized stormwater solutions can produce important ancillary environmental benefits. Previous research has estimated values for surface water quality [Carson and Mitchell, 1993;Van Houtven et al, 2007;Johnston et al, 2005] and for flood reduction from stormwater management [Bin and Polasky, 2004;Zhai et al, 2006Zhai et al, , 2007, but no estimates exist for the values of some of the other environmental benefits of alternative approaches to stormwater control. This paper fills that gap by using a choice experiment survey of households in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to estimate the values of multiple attributes of stormwater management outcomes.…”

Estimating Fuel Cycle Externalities: Analytical Methods and Issues, Report 2

“…Some of these studies use a water quality ladder to convey improvements in a river (Smith and Desvousges 1986) and nationally (Carson and Mitchell 1988).…”