People prefer conservation as way to protect drinking water

Greenseams
Will Allen, vice president for sustainable programs and director of conservation planning and integrated services at the Conservation Fund, said the organization is involved in many projects that utilize green infrastructure, such as a project called Greenseams in Milwaukee.

According to the Conservation Fund’s Web site, Greenseams launched in 2001 as a flood management program partnership between the organization and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District. The group purchased land and conservation easements upstream from the city where major suburban growth was expected to occur.

More than 100 properties have been protected, preserving 3,142 acres of flood-prone land within greater Milwaukee, including 28 communities and 1.1 million people. The wetlands protected and restored by the program are capable of holding an estimated 1.3 billion gallons of water.

Allen said the goal of green infrastructure is not just to ensure that water is clean and improve the quality of a city’s drinking water, but also to deal with flood mitigation.

“Milwaukee is unluckily a poster child for flooding. It’s just really flat and all the water just kind of drains into the city and they can have some catastrophic floods,” said Allen.

Flooding can be especially problematic in American cities that have aging systems in which floods can cause water to mix with sewage.

Green infrastructure is beneficial in helping prevent flooding before it happens, something that gray infrastructure can sometimes have trouble dealing with.

“If you can avoid having a lot of water go into those storm water systems then you can avoid the combined sewer overflows,” said Allen.

Importance of messaging
The survey also examined how different messages affected people’s choices.

They found that when it comes to developing a message to inform citizens why protecting water is important, people were more willing to give when climate change or global warming was discussed compared to messages that emphasized extreme weather events.

“The big surprise was that messages stating that ‘storms are increasing in frequency due to extreme weather events,’ led to a dramatic decrease in people’s willingness to pay for either conservation or gray infrastructure” said Messer. “This has important implications for how politicians and conservation leaders talk about drinking water protection.”

Messer said that when it comes to policymaking, there has been a debate on whether it was more effective to avoid discussion of climate change and instead focus on large storms. This study suggests focusing on extreme weather events may have a negative impact.

“This research suggests the emphasis on large storms like Hurricane Sandy will actually make people less willing to take action as it appears that people perceive these large storms as being out of human control,” he said. “If it’s just decaying infrastructure, normal storms, or even climate change, then people might feel they can do something about it. But when you start really emphasizing these large magnitude storms, there becomes a sense of hopelessness.”

— Read more in Sean F. Ellis et al., “The Effects of Climate Change Information on Charitable Giving for Water Quality Protection: A Field Experiment,” Agricultural and Resource Economics Review (29 July 2016): 319-37 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/age.2016.17)

— Read more in A. Shcherbak, A Recipe for the Democracy? The Spread of the European Diet and Political Change (2016)