What will it cost to recover Puget Sound? What information is available to help quantify the trade-offs between these costs and the benefits of a healthy Puget Sound? What tools can be used to value the benefits of protection or recovery actions?
To support the implementation of the Puget Sound 2018-2022 Action Agenda and its associated Implementation Strategies, the Puget Sound recovery community invited Northern Economics to host a workshop to help address some of these questions, and more.
The objective of the workshop was to introduce professional planners and managers of Action Agenda implementation to basic economic concepts, approaches and tools. Participants then applied this information to real-world examples to assist them in making informed decisions that acknowledge the underlying trade-offs.
Economists with a wide range of experience in environmental economics joined the workshop to share knowledge with the recovery community and learn a bit themselves. The presenters included:
- Sunny Jardine, UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs
- Robby Fonner, NOAA
- Leif Anderson, NOAA
- Trina Wellman, Northern Economics
Presentations included topics in several types of economic analyses and tools that could be applied to recovery efforts:
- Benefit-cost analysis
- Measures the benefits and costs of each candidate action in dollar terms
- Prioritize actions based on their net economic benefit
- Calculate the economic value of ecosystem goods and services
- Cost-effectiveness analysis:
- What is the greatest benefit achievable with a specified budget?
- What is the lowest cost means of achieving a specified level benefit?
- Economic impact analysis
- Measures contributions or impacts including direct, indirect, and induced effects in regional or community economies
- Discounting
- How much is a value that occurs in the future worth today?
The afternoon session broke into case study discussions including questions like:
- What are the benefits and associated economic values of green stormwater infrastructure? Which values can be quantified? (Stormwater)
- What are the costs and benefits of shoreline restoration and protection? How do these differ across different shoreline protection techniques? (Shorelines)
- How can we quantify the economic impacts of classification changes to a shellfish growing area and the impact of every additional day a growing area is closed? (Shellfish)
- What factors contribute to the success or failure of using incentives to change behaviors? (Marine Water Quality)
- How can the values of ecosystem services provided by critical areas be quantified? (Land Development and Cover)
Did you know: Northern Economics will work with partners from the Habitat Strategic Initiative and the Marine Water Quality Implementation Strategy Lead this year to help inform some part of the questions above through case studies. The results will be used to inform on-going improvement of the recovery community information and tools used for recovery.