Economic
analysis provides watershed moment for environmental groups
Oregon State
University
Economists have found
that in the United States, watershed groups have had a positive impact on their
local water quality.
The study is published
in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is the first empirical evidence that nonprofit organizations can provide
public goods, said Christian Langpap, an Oregon State University economist and
study co-author with Laura Grant, an assistant professor of economics at
Claremont McKenna College.
In economics, a public
good is a commodity or service that individuals cannot be effectively excluded
from using, and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to
others. For these reasons, public goods can't be provided for profit and
nonprofits can play an important role.
"Environmental nonprofit groups are assumed to provide public goods," said Langpap, an associate professor in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences. "But until now that assumption has never been tested empirically. We determined that the presence of water groups in a watershed resulted in improved water quality and higher proportions of swimmable and fishable water bodies."
The presence and
activity of watershed groups can impact water quality in various ways,
including oversight and monitoring, direct actions such as organizing
volunteers for cleanups or restoration, and indirect actions like advocacy and
education.
The researchers'
analysis combined data on water quality and watershed groups for 2,150
watersheds in the continental United States from 1996 to 2008. The number of
watershed groups across the lower 48 tripled during this period, from 500 to
1,500.
Grant and Langpap
constructed a model that considered dissolved oxygen deficiency as the
measurement of water quality. Dissolved oxygen deficiency is the most common
and overarching measure of water quality because dissolved oxygen is critical
for many forms of aquatic life that use oxygen in respiration, including fish,
invertebrates, bacteria and plants. It was also the water quality measure that
had the most data available during the study period.
The researchers used
three measures of group activity in a watershed in a given year: total number
of active groups, total donations to all groups in the watershed and total
expenditures by groups in the watershed.
The model produced
some significant results. For example, a nonprofit in a watershed was
associated with reduced dissolved oxygen deficiency relative to a watershed in
which there were no groups.
Additionally, a
$100,000 increase in total donations to nonprofits in a watershed, equivalent
to a 10 percent increase to the average, also was associated with reduced
dissolved oxygen deficiency. And a $100,000 increase in nonprofit expenditures,
a 7 percent increase, was also associated with improved water quality.
They controlled for
additional factors that impact water quality at the watershed level: violations
of the U.S. Clean Water Act, spending via federal water quality programs, land
use, precipitation, election outcomes, population density, per capita income,
educational attainment, ethnicity, home ownership and unemployment.
"This is a unique
data set that allowed this question to be answered empirically," Langpap said.
"We painstakingly gathered this list of watershed groups. Once we had
their location, we could match them to their watershed. Using their tax
records, we knew how much they received in donations and how much they
spent."