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.
Researchers Develop New Tools to Estimate Economic Value of Restoring Urban Streams
Monday, June 5, 2023