The Value of River Health to the Residential Community of the Georges and Cook River Catchments, 2013-2016
ILWS Strategic Research Area
Ecosystem Services
Investigators/ Researchers
Buyani Thomy, PhD candidate. Supervisors Dr Roderick Duncan and Prof Mark Morrison (ILWS)
Description
The health of urban rivers is important for sustainable living, but little data is available to aid communities in making decisions about improving urban river health. This project seeks to apply and extend a newly developed revealed preference approach which identifies how household recreation and amenity values change from improved urban river health.
The proposed method will be applied to the Cooks and Georges Rivers in NSW to estimate amenity and recreation benefits for improved river health for the local communities.
Pic Georges River Sydney
Outcomes
Expected project outcomes include:
- demonstration of the connection between improvements in urban river health and private benefits to the local communities
- demonstration of the achievements of government policy when the values are used in cost benefit analyses
- provision of guidance for future policy and decision making processes with regards to river restoration investments.
- significant methodological contribution to the non-market valuation literature
CONTACT:
Buyani Thomy
Charles Sturt University –Bathurst
email
June 2014