September 5, 2014 Examples of the need for applied economics in South Florida ecosystem restoration include the following economic opportunity costs, integrated and compounded over the period of time required for the completed restoration infrastructure to have a measurable effect on the target ecosystems*: -- the diminished value of the ecosystem services provided by a water quantity- and quality-impaired Everglades**. -- the diminished value of the commercial, recreational, and aesthetic services provided by water quantity- and quality-impaired East and West Coast Estuaries***. When these opportunity costs are accurately quantified over the appropriate recovery period, the differences in the time to and degree of recovery of the estuaries and the Everglades between CEPP and the Plan 6 central flowway will likely pay for Plan 6 several times over. Our elected and appointed officials have a fiduciary duty to Florida taxpayers and the consumers of those impaired commercial, recreational, aesthetic, and environmental services to get the biggest bang for the restoration buck. CEPP isnt it! Instead, CEPP represents a continuation of explicit and implicit economic subsidies of sugar cane farming in the status quo, including the irreversible consumption of peat soil. Moreover, the mechanization of sugar cane farming over the last several decades has substantially reduced its economic benefits without substantially reducing its economic detriments. Finally, after completion between 2030 and 2040, the combination of BMPs and RASTAs adopted by CEPP will only not quite attain the TP WQS and an additional 230,000 acre-ft per year of RASTA-treated water, while inadequately treating excess nitrate and having virtually no effect on excess sulfate or its influence on the mercury impairment of the downstream Everglades. Do we have a retired environmental economist in the audience who has the training, experience, and interest in testing my economic hypothesis as regards the substantial comparative economic benefits of the central flowway over CEPP? I any case, I will add these observations to my formal public comments on the CEPP Final Report, which are due at the close of business on September 8, 2014. Larry E. Fink, M.S. Waterwise Consulting, LLC *The time-to-recovery of more natural ecosystem structure, function, and throughput per Eugen and Howard Odum (esanalysis.colmex.mx/Sorted%20Papers/2000/2000%20USA%20-3F%20Econ%202.pdf) was intentionally omitted from the CEPP process to avoid these comparisons. The greater the intra- and inter-annual variabilities of the physical, chemical, and biological processes upon which the performance measures are based and/or the noisier the measurements required to demonstrate the attainment of those performance measures, the longer that period of time will be. In this context, uncertainty works to the benefit of the environment, not the impairer of those ecosystems services. This is also true for impaired commercial, recreational, and aesthetic services. **The costs of lost Everglades environmental services are exacerbated by the retardation of their recovery to unimpaired conditions by contaminated Everglades sediment. In neither CEPP nor CERP are there any plans for contaminated sediment physical removal, chemical stabilization. or biological treatment by harvesting cattail and encouraging the switch back to sawgrass. Elsewhere, I have calculated that the harvesting of cattail is likely to cut the recovery time by a factor of three, while paying for itself over the CEPP design horizon with electricity generated by an appropriately scaled co-generation power plant burning harvested cattail dried with its waste heat. ***These losses include the fouling of boat props in algae-clogged waters, the presence of pathogenic algae, bacteria, and amoebae in pathogenic amounts, and the loss of largemouth bass fishing opportunities in dissolved oxygen-depleted waters.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 22:23:56 +0000
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