FLOOD00757

• County: Statewide
• Title: Incorporating the Public's Changing Values for Water: Economic Techniques and Dollar Amounts
• Date: 11/3/1997
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Educational/Technical/Reference Information

than the number of letters received for and against a proposal. Water managers have

legitimate skepticism over water demands of groups who will bear none of the costs of their

desires for maximum fishery flows. By what anglers, rafters or households would pay, forces

instream water users too balance the benefits of added flow with the costs to themselves.

These "willingness to pay" estimates are similar to "shadow prices" often used in engineering

economics or derived from constrained optimization models.

Expressing the public's values in dollar terms allows a balancing of the recreational and

environmental benefits of instream flow with the costs. While Flug, Fontane and Ghoneim's

approach of creating a zero to one index to reflect the relative value of recreation as a

function of flow is clever, the resulting index values are not comparable to costs.

Communicating economic values of water in competing uses provides comparability among
the differing uses of water and helps to avoid the "us and them" mentality so frequent in
water debates. Large differences in the value of water for instream versus irrigated
agriculture suggests gains from trade. The public through its state government agencies can
offer to purchase the consumptive use portion of water from fanners so as to augment
instream flows. Water leasing in drought years opens up the possibility that blue ribbon trout
streams need not go dry to grow low value crops. Drought year waterbanks have worked
quite successfully in California to move over 800,000 acre feet of water from agriculture to
other uses in a matter of months (Loomis, 1992) with fanners gaining and "relatively low"
third-party effects (Howitt, 1992).

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