Hale W. Thurston

Impediments and Solutions to Sustainable, Watershed-Scale Urban Stormwater Management: Lessons from Australia and the United States

In urban and suburban areas, stormwater runoff is a primary stressor on surface waters. Conventional urban stormwater drainage systems often route runoff directly to streams and rivers, thus exacerbating pollutant inputs and hydrologic disturbance, and resulting in the degradation of ecosystem structure and function. Decentralized stormwater management tools, such as low impact development (LID) or water sensitive urban design (WSUD), may offer a more sustainable solution to stormwater management if implemented at a watershed scale. These tools are designed to pond, infiltrate, and harvest water at the source, encouraging evaporation, evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and re-use of stormwater. While there are numerous demonstrations of WSUD practices, there are few examples of widespread implementation at a watershed scale with the explicit objective of protecting or restoring a receiving stream. This article identifies seven major impediments to sustainable urban stormwater management: (1) uncertainties in performance and cost, (2) insufficient engineering standards and guidelines, (3) fragmented responsibilities, (4) lack of institutional capacity, (5) lack of legislative mandate, (6) lack of funding and effective market incentives, and (7) resistance to change. By comparing experiences from Australia and the United States, two developed countries with existing conventional stormwater infrastructure and escalating stream ecosystem degradation, we highlight challenges facing sustainable urban stormwater management and offer several examples of successful, regional WSUD implementation. We conclude by identifying solutions to each of the seven impediments that, when employed separately or in combination, should encourage widespread implementation of WSUD with watershed-based goals to protect human health and safety, and stream ecosystems.

The multidisciplinary influence of common sustainability indices

Sustainability is often poorly defined and difficult to measure. We describe several concepts from ecology, economics, and physics, that have contributed to sustainability indices, and discuss their positive and negative aspects. Indices range from mostly ecological (such as ecosystem resilience and global human carrying capacity), to those inspired by both economics and ecology (green income and maximum sustainable yield), to a mix of ecology and physics (exergy and emergy). Economic concepts such as substitutability of natural and human capital (the “weak” versus “strong” sustainability debate), and throughput of natural resources through an economic system, are the basis for several strictly economic indices. The second law of thermodynamics, which dictates the decrease in usable energy, has also had an increasing influence on sustainability discussions. The indices described here address different aspects of the interactions between human societies and ecosystems, and are therefore probably most effec...

ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES: Building Green Infrastructure via Citizen Participation: A Six-Year Study in the Shepherd Creek (Ohio)

Green infrastructure at the parcel scale provides critical ecosystem goods and services when these services (such as flood mitigation) must be provided locally. Here we report on an approach that encourages suburban landowners to mitigate impervious surfaces on their properties through a voluntary auction mechanism. We used an economic incentive to place rain gardens and rain barrels onto parcels in a 1.8-km2 watershed near Cincinnati, Ohio. A comprehensive hydrologic, water-quality, and ecological monitoring campaign documented environmental conditions before and after treatment. In 2007 and 2008, we engaged private landowners through a reverse auction to encourage placement of one rain garden and up to four rain barrels on their property. The program led to the installation of 83 rain gardens and 176 rain barrels onto more than 20% of the properties, and preliminary analyses indicate that the overall discharge regime was altered by the treatments. The length of the study (six years) may have precluded observation of treatment effects on water quality and aquatic biological communities, as we would expect these conditions to respond more slowly to management changes. These distributed storm-water installations contributed to ecosystem services such as flood protection, water supply, and water infiltration; provided benefits to the local residents; and reduced the need for larger, expensive, centralized retrofits (such as deep tunnel storage).

Comparing drinking water treatment costs to source water protection costs using time series analysis

We present a framework to compare water treatment costs to source water protection costs, an important knowledge gap for drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs). This trade-off helps to determine what incentives a DWTP has to invest in natural infrastructure or pollution reduction in the watershed rather than pay for treatment on site. To illustrate, we use daily observations from 2007 to 2011 for the Bob McEwen Water Treatment Plant, Clermont County, Ohio, to understand the relationship between treatment costs and water quality and operational variables (e.g., turbidity, total organic carbon [TOC], pool elevation, and production volume). Part of our contribution to understanding drinking water treatment costs is examining both long-run and short-run relationships using error correction models (ECMs). Treatment costs per 1000 gallons (per 3.79 m3) were based on chemical, pumping, and granular activated carbon costs. Results from the ECM suggest that a 1% decrease in turbidity decreases treatment costs by 0.02% immediately and an additional 0.1% over future days. Using mean values for the plant, a 1% decrease in turbidity leads to

Environmental economics for watershed restoration.

1123/year decrease in treatment costs. To compare these costs with source water protection costs, we use a polynomial distributed lag model to link total phosphorus loads, a source water quality parameter affected by land use changes, to turbidity at the plant. We find the costs for source water protection to reduce loads much greater than the reduction in treatment costs during these years. Although we find no incentive to protect source water in our case study, this framework can help DWTPs quantify the trade-offs.

Valuing acid mine drainage remediation in West Virginia: benefit transfer with preference calibration

Preface About the Editors Contributors Abbreviations Introduction to Economic Jargon and Decision Tools Hale W. Thurston, Matthew T. Heberling, and Alyse Schrecongost A Closer Look at Valuation Methods and Their Uses Hale W. Thurston, Matthew T. Heberling, and Alyse Schrecongost Valuing the Restoration of Acidic Streams in the Appalachian Region: A Stated Choice Method Alan R. Collins, Randall S. Rosenberger, and Jerald J. Fletcher Using Hedonic Modeling to Value AMD Remediation in the Cheat River Watershed James M. Williamson and Hale W. Thurston Using Benefit Transfer to Value Acid Mine Drainage Remediation in West Virginia James M. Williamson, Hale W. Thurston, and Matthew T. Heberling Economics of Ecosystem Management for the Catawba River Basin Randall A. Kramer, Jonathan I. Eisen-Hecht, and Gene E. Vaughan Estimating Willingness to Pay for Aquatic Resource Improvements Using Benefits Transfer Robert J. Johnston and Elena Y. Besedin Using Conceptual Models to Communicate Environmental Changes Matthew T. Heberling, George Van Houtven, Stephen Beaulieu, Randall J. F. Bruins, Evan Hansen, Anne Sergeant, and Hale W. Thurston Local Economic Benefits of Restoring Deckers Creek:A Preliminary Analysis Alyse Schrecongost and Evan Hansen Glossary Index

Exploring Nontraditional Participation as an Approach to Make Water Quality Trading Markets More Effective

Several thousand kilometers of West Virginia streams are degraded by acid mine drainage, and the estimates for cleanup range in the billions of dollars (US

Sustainability and Environmental Economics: Some Critical Foci

). This article demonstrates the use of a nonmarket valuation technique, benefit transfer, to estimate the benefits of restoring an impaired region of the Cheat River Watershed in West Virginia. Second, we compare two benefit transfer tools that can be used for making decisions about restoration under constrained budgets. We find the annual value of remediation in a two-county region to be between

Application of market mechanisms and incentives to reduce stormwater runoff § An integrated hydrologic, economic and legal approach

1.4 and

Controlling Storm-Water Runoff with Tradable Allowances for Impervious Surfaces

8.9 million, depending on the estimating model. The results from our research demonstrate the challenges involved in applying benefit transfer to a policy site, as well as the differences in outcome between a simple unit transfer technique and a new preference calibration benefit transfer technique.