Putting a price on harmful algal blooms with Gretchen Greene

Photo: Captains for Clean Water

In a Clean Coast Texas webinar, Gretchen Greene explains how defensible economic evidence can strengthen the case for water quality improvement measures.

“You don’t miss the value of the water quality until the fish are dying,” Gretchen Greene told a Clean Coast Texas Lunch & Learn audience. In the webinar, Gretchen describes the economic impact of harmful algal blooms (HABs) on coastal economies and how it can be measured.

Gretchen presents findings from an economic impact study Greene Economics prepared for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, and Captains for Clean Water. She shows how water quality affects tourism, commercial and recreational fishing, property values, local tax revenue, and quality of life. Using a literature review, stakeholder interviews, and economic data, the firm estimated that a severe bloom like Florida’s 2018 red tide event could cost $5.2 billion in coastal economic activity and 43,000 jobs across three counties.

“There are different metrics and they’re used for different purposes,” Gretchen says. Legislators, she notes, “tend to be moved much more by the coastal economy and the jobs numbers.” Federal benefit-cost analysis, by contrast, relies on the value of recreation and other non-market benefits. Even a walk on a clean beach has value, though no money changes hands.

Economic evidence helps organizations and elected leaders build support for restoration and conservation, public education, strategic growth and city planning, and the regulation and funding that protect water quality. “Having the numbers helps strip away a lot of the rhetoric,” Gretchen says.

WATCH THE WEBINAR

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Gretchen Greene has more than 30 years of experience working with federal, state, tribal, and municipal agencies, as well as private industry and law firms. Her expertise includes water demand and management, ecosystem service valuation, natural resource damage assessment, agriculture, and public infrastructure investment.