W1133: Benefits and Costs of Natural Resources Policies Affecting Public and Private Lands
Statement of Issues and Justification
Many federal and state agencies, as well as private landowners face difficulties in balancing economic feasibility with environmental quality. Federal agencies must justify decisions about changing recreation access or public land livestock grazing to protect wildlife habitat or restrictions on farm practices to improve water quality with benefit-cost analysis as part of their regulatory impact analysis. Agencies and the private landowners wish to know if particular changes are overly burdensome on ranchers, farmers and small businesses. This requires the comparison of the benefits to society of the increase in environmental or recreation quality with costs incurred by landowners or opportunity cost of foregone commodity production on federal lands. The objectives of this regional research project are designed to provide this type of benefit and cost information needed by federal, state and county decision makers and private landowners.There is also widespread interest in obtaining estimates of the economic values of open space and agricultural land preservation by stakeholders as varied as city and county governments, state governments and federal agencies such as USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and USDA Economic Research Service.
With the adoption by federal land management agencies of ecosystem management as a guiding principle, there is a strong need for economic information on the benefits and costs of ecosystem management as compared to traditional multiple use management. Part of the evidence of strong interest in these types of economic information by agencies is their frequent and extensive participation and attendance at the previous regional research meetings by USDA Economic Research Service, USDA Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees. In addition, research results from W133 have been quickly adopted by federal agencies. Examples include the USDA Forest Service use of W133 results as the basis for their Strategic Plan and Resource Planning Act values of recreation (Rosenberger of WV and Loomis of CO, 2000) and USDA and EPA reliance on W133 groundwater quality studies for formulating confined animal feeding operation regulations.
This project allows economies to be realized by each participating station and the federal agencies from eliminating duplication in development of statistical methods and survey designs. As detailed below, some stations will lead efforts to develop improved quantitative methods or surveys that will be applied by additional stations and the results compared. The coordinated research will allow stations that have expertise in quantitative methods (e.g., Nevada, Iowa) to provide state-of-the-art revealed preference models for use by other states (e.g., Colorado). States with survey development expertise (e.g., Maine) can provide survey templates that can be implemented by other participating states and the results compared.
Failure to undertake this regional research project will result in; (a) duplication of some research; and (b) failure to conduct the full breadth and depth of research proposed in this project by the stations individually due to limited financial resources. Failure to conduct this research will also leave many smaller federal agencies that do not have their own research programs without standardized surveys and reliable methods for estimating recreation and ecosystem benefits and costs. Failure to complete the research proposed here will make it difficult for federal agencies to complete required EIS's and regulatory impact analyses in a timely fashion using existing benefit and cost estimates that would be provided by this project.
The research project is feasible to conduct by participating stations as is evidenced from past successful collaborations and documented in our proceedings and agency publications. In particular, this project builds upon and extends models initially developed over the last five years which will now see wider application to other participating stations. This regional research project has assembled a complementary set of stations, some with expertise in statistical modeling (e.g., Iowa, Nevada, Utah), others with expertise in survey methodology (e.g., Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan) and others with theory expertise (e.g., California). As noted in the outreach section several members of participating stations have formal extension appointments so that dissemination of research results to stakeholders is ensured.
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