Researchers Develop New Tools to Estimate Economic Value of Restoring Urban Streams

Urban streams often become increasingly polluted as municipalities expand around them. It can be challenging to quantify the benefits of improving their ecological health. A national team of researchers, including Melissa Kenney, PhD, and Hillary Waters, PhD, of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment (IonE), has developed a suite of tools to estimate the economic value of improving water quality in urban streams. Their approach, which is published in a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article, takes into account community perceptions of the value of improvements - namely how much residents of Durham and Wake counties, North Carolina, would be willing to pay to implement pollution control strategies. Read more on the IonE website. IonE is a Consortium member center. Kenney is IonE's Director of Research & Knowledge Initiatives and Principal Research Scholar in Environmental Decision Support Science; Waters was a Senior Researcher with IonE.