Selected Methods For Understanding Risks, Costs, And Benefits Associated With Attaining Water Quality Standards

(1) Will achieving the TMDL actually result in designated use attainment?

(2) Are there lower-cost methods of achieving the same ends?

(3) What are the ecological and societal benefits of various restoration approaches, and are they proportional to the costs?

(4) Where social or economic impact of attainment is thought to be too high, should the designated use be changed?

State water program interviews conducted recently by EPA/OW revealed that designated-use issues, including problems associated with Use Attainability Analysis (UAA), are at the top of the States' agenda. Existing UAA guidance needs to be clarified on many points. One of the key issues in UAA is the implicit or explicit balancing of ecological vs. socioeconomic objectives.

Under an existing project, NCEA has carried out case studies and developed a draft framework for integrating ecological risk and economics to support place-based decisions, (e.g., decisions made at the watershed level). These studies focused on the protection of important ecological resources, but neither the case studies nor the framework specifically address the attainment of designated uses, or the potential need to alter a designation. Our proposed document is the first step to examine the framework's feasibility to address these issues.

The goal of this applied research is to provide scientific support to States, Tribes, and OW Programs by exploring how risks, costs, benefits, water quality standards, and watershed restoration may be linked for analysis. To accomplish this goal, the objectives are to illustrate the connections of ecological endpoints, ecosystem services, and economic endpoints along with describing various valuation tools that could analyze changes to those endpoints. We want to explore suggested approaches that are well-anchored in both natural science and social science.