David S. Brookshire

• Managing Director at University of New Mexico

Creating measurable ecological accounting units has become a point of emphasis in valuing ecosystem services. Understanding which ecological endpoints, which emanate from biophysical production functions, are important to individuals could help to create measurable ecological accounting units. Using two semi-arid riparian ecosystems we create a sui...

Stated preference methods have been used to value non-market public goods but questions remain about their incentive compatibility. A public goods referendum has proven to be incentive compatible for the more popular contingent valuation method. For attribute based choices, the choice experimental method values goods and services by attribute level...

A decision framework is developed for quantifying the economic value of information (VOI) from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission for drought monitoring, with a focus on the potential contributions of groundwater storage and soil moisture measurements from the GRACE data assimilation (GRACE-DA) system. The study c...

Providing for increased water demands during periods of persistent drought and climatic variability may require water managers, users and planners to think differently about how water resources are allocated. A water marketing institution that allows water rights holders to reallocate water on a temporary basis could overcome these challenges with...

The conversion of bottomland hardwood and swamp forests to irrigated agriculture has had problematic consequences for water bodies. Many of these problems can be linked to the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to increase crop production. To date, there is little monitoring of nitrogen use in watersheds, which may be due to large fixed costs. U...

Conservation of freshwater ecosystems in the semi-arid southwestern U.S. is a critical issue as these systems support habitat for wildlife and provide consumptive use for humankind. Economists have utilized stated preference techniques to value non-marketed goods and services such as freshwater ecosystems for much of the last four decades. Recently...

Climate variability, population growth and persistent droughts present water managers with challenges in allocating ever scarcer water resources. Water marketing intuitions that allow for the temporary transfer of water between water users can provide water managers and users with the ability to manage this challenge with minimal conflict. This pap...

Most lowland rivers in the southwestern United States have been impounded, diverted, or dewatered. Lack of flooding due to river impoundments on the Middle Rio Grande has contributed to the spread of exotic vegetation such as Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) and saltcedar (Tamarix) associated with fuel loads of dense understory. Management ha...

We compare individual consumer response between ex ante market data collected by a water utility and ex post experimentally generated data. The experimentally generated data are matched to each participant's water bill history, which predates the experiment. This differentiates our research from prior efforts, which analyze market and experimental...

Water is a critical component for sustaining both natural and human systems. Yet the value of water for sustaining ecosystem services is not well quantified in monetary terms. Ideally decisions involving water resource management would include an apples-to-apples comparison of the costs and benefits in dollars of both market and non-market goods an...

This paper describes specific ways in which the analysis of ecosystem goods and services can be included in terrestrial carbon sequestration assessments and planning. It specifically reviews the U.S. Geological Survey’s LandCarbon assessment methodology for ecosystem services. The report assumes that the biophysical analysis of co-effects should be...

Groundwater is a key driver of riparian condition on dryland rivers but is in high demand for municipal, industrial, and agricultural uses. Approaches are needed to guide decisions that balance human water needs while conserving riparian ecosystems. We developed a space-for-time substitution model that links groundwater change scenarios implemented...

Explosive population growth coupled with stable or decreasing water supplies has often led to stress upon already over-allocated watersheds in the western United States. Water markets that allow the temporary transfer (i.e., lease) of a water right are a possible mechanism to provide flexibility to water managers to fulfill water demands in these o...

Conservation of freshwater systems is critical in the semi-arid Southwest where ground water and flood regimes strongly influence the abundance, composition, and structure of riparian vegetation. At the same time, these systems are in high demand for competing human uses. To address this conflict, natural scientists must evaluate how anthropogenic...

Rapid population growth coupled with stable or decreasing water supplies has further stressed already over-allocated water resources in the western United States. In this article, we consider the issues that lead to the further consideration of a water market. Specifically, we consider water markets that allow for the temporary transfer (lease) of...

Background/Question/Methods Conservation of freshwater systems is critical in the semi-arid Southwest where groundwater and flood regimes strongly influence the abundance, composition, and structure of riparian (streamside) vegetation. At the same time these systems are in high demand for competing human use. To address this conflict, natural scie...

Background/Question/Methods Riparian systems in the southwest provide important ecosystem services for human society, including recreational values and maintenance of high biological diversity. Changes in groundwater or restoration can dramatically alter vegetation composition and structure in Southwestern riparian systems with subsequent impacts...

Background/Question/Methods Benefit transfer is the economic technique of taking economic benefits measured for one or more goods from a specific location and time and then “transferring“ those values to a different, location, good or time. This technique is used when de novo studies are not feasible due to financial or time constraints, yet the r...

Should CVM values be utilized to determine an award of monetary damages for injuries to a public natural resource Cummings and Harrison's general theme is that the values obtained from CVM and indirect method studies (such as HPM) are sufficiently inaccurate as to be deemed unacceptable in determining compensable damages. The authors' theme is one...

Decision-makers and natural resource managers increasingly require much more sophisticated levels of expert findings and scientific results, coupled with economic information, to make informed decisions. No single scientific discipline is typically capable of providing integrated solutions for decision-makers and managers. Significant effort beyond...

Water has long been a scarce commodity in the western US. The difficulty of developing accurate economic models to aid in policy decision making has been exacerbated by; the promulgation of environmental laws to ensure the survival of endangered species; heightened debates over the impacts of climate on water resources; increasing populations; and...

Since 1950 demand for water has more than doubled in the United States. Virtually all water supplies are allocated, leading to the question, where will water come from? The concept of water leasing has gained considerable attention as a volunteer, market-mediated system for transferring water between competing uses. For a water leasing system to be...

Public mediated resource planning is quickly becoming the norm rather than the exception. Unfortunately, supporting tools are lacking that interactively engage the public in the decision-making process and integrate over the myriad values that influence water policy. In the pages of this report we document the first steps toward developing a specia...

Researchers at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) are conducting SAHRA-related research aimed at developing an integrated physical and engineering hydrologic model for the purpose of investigating the feasibility of water banking and markets in the Rio Grande watershed. The main components of the integrated model will include a detailed representa...

This paper presents a general model of optimal water management for a transboundary aquifer under three different management approaches: cooperative, noncooperative, and myopic. Comparing the results from the approaches, we find the cooperative solution, where a single management plan is executed for all parts of the aquifer, results in the highest...

Approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface is considered to be arid or semiarid. The availability of water in such regions is particularly sensitive to climate variability while the demand for water is experiencing an explosive increase as populations continue to grow. The competition for available freshwater is exerting considerable press...

The sustainable management of water resources in a river basin requires an integrated analysis of the social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions of the problem. Numerical models are commonly used for integration of these dimensions and for communication of the analysis results to stakeholders and policy makers. The National Scienc...

Since 1950, the demand for water has more than doubled in the United States. Historically, growing demands have been met by increasing reservoir capacity and through groundwater mining, often at the expense of environmental and cultural concerns. The future is expected to hold much the same. Demand for water will continue to increase particularly i...

Market prices contain information about supply and demand, the institutions that influence both these elements, and the operation of the market. Prices also allocate scarce resources to higher-valued uses. In this paper we analyze the price history of three water markets in the arid Southwest: Arizona's Central Arizona Project, Colorado's Colorado...

SAHRA INTEGRATED MODELING APPROACH TO ADDRESS WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN SEMI-ARID RIVER BASINS Everett P. Springer, Hoshin V. Gupta, David S. Brookshire, Yuqiong Liu Everett P. Springer, Technical Staff Member Environmental Dynamics and Spatial Analysis Group, MS J495, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, 505-667-0569, everet...

We explore the dynamic and conflicting interaction of incentives for private versus riparian habitat water use in the context of a mountain front recharge system. A novel situation arises wherein private uses are consumptive while riparian habitat uses, although clearly consumptive, are closely related to water stocks. The hydrology of the mountain...

The Southwestern United States is a semi-arid region that has experienced rapid population growth in the past few decades. This growth shows little sign of abating, so much so that there is concern among water planners and managers as to where additional water supplies will be found. The few large existing perennial streams—such as the Colorado Riv...

Residential water demand is the product of population and per capita demand. Estimates of per capita demand often are based on econometric models of demand, usually based on time series data of demand aggregated at the water provider level. Various studies have examined the impact of such factors as water pricing, weather, and income, with many oth...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource and the future viability of many regions will depend in large part on how efficiently resources are utilized. A key factor to this success will be a thorough understanding of consumers and the characteristics that drive their water use. In this research test and find support for the hypothesis that residenti...

Difficulties in developing precise economic policy models for water reallocation and re-regulation in various regional and transboundary settings has been exacerbated not only by climate issues but also by institutional changes reflected in the promulgation of environmental laws, changing regional populations, and an increased focus on water qualit...

Provision of water raises several issues for municipal utility companies and other suppliers, including reliability of supply in arid regions or during droughts, equity issues that arise because water is literally a necessity, and heterogeneity in consumer response to regulatory policy. We combine experimental and survey responses to investigate de...

What role can geoscience information play in the assessment of risk and the value of insurance, especially for natural hazard type risks? In an earlier, related paper Ganderton and others (2000) provided subjects with relatively simple geoscience information concerning natural hazard-type risks. Their research looked at how subjects purchase insura...

Efforts to “test” public-goods provision mechanisms in field settings encounter a fundamental obstacle: investigators cannot determine whether the aggregate valuation of the public good exceeds the cost. Experimental laboratory settings can fix the provision of the public good to be efficient. This allows investigation of the performance of the mec...

Abstract Increasing concern with “sustainability”issues has raised natural questions regarding western water use. Efficient water allocation requires policy tools based on the value of water in alternative uses: agricultural, environmental, residential and others. Agricultural values are fairly well established. Environmental,values are recognized...

Reallocating water is a politically sensitive issue in the western United States. Changes from agricultural uses to urban or environmental uses are occurring, but the process tends to polarize competing water users, thus creating barriers to reallocation. Other barriers are inherent in the appropriation doctrine, and some barriers exist because of...

This collection of original essays by economists, biologists and political scientists has a common theme: that protecting species at risk while safeguarding social order is a policy challenge that entangles biology, politics, and economics. Nearly 1200 species are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973; on...

This collection of original essays by economists, biologists and political scientists has a common theme: that protecting species at risk while safeguarding social order is a policy challenge that entangles biology, politics, and economics. Nearly 1200 species are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973; on...

This collection of original essays by economists, biologists and political scientists has a common theme: that protecting species at risk while safeguarding social order is a policy challenge that entangles biology, politics, and economics. Nearly 1200 species are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973; on...

We consider the ex ante informational implications of the mandatory surrender feature of a stylized emission permit auction, similar to that in the U.S. EPA SO2 permit scheme, but modeled as a uniform price auction. The theory suggests that generally the auction gives misleading signals concerning the expected price of permits in the post-auction p...

We investigate the effects of uncertainty and concomitant risk aversion as they impact the incentive structure and subsequent operation of an emissions permit market modeled after the U.S. S02 market. Our theoretical results suggest that uncertainty dulls incentives to achieve cost savings through permit trading and inhibits efficient allocation of...

This paper presents a series of experiments that confront subjects with low probability, high loss situations. A rich parameter set is examined and we find subjects respond to low probability, high loss risks in predictable ways. As loss events become more likely, or loss amounts get larger, or the cost of insurance falls, subjects are more likely...

The protection of instream flows, the flow of water in natural river channels, is a controversial environmental issue throughout the US West. This is especially the case in New Mexico, which is unique in that no legal avenue for protection exists. This contingent valuation study investigates the non-market benefits of protecting minimum instream fl...

We offer three reasons why economics matters more to species protection than many people think and what this implies for the ongoing debate over the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Economics matters because (1) human behavior generally, and economic parameters in particular, help determine the degree of risk to a species; (2)...

This paper investigates a class of market mechanisms for environmental regulation based on the Clean Air Act tradable discharge permit program. Laboratory market experiments capture some of the more salient institutional features and focus on issues of firm technological heterogeneity and irreversible investment regarding the operation of the permi...

Although the majority of contingent valuation studies have been for environmental goods, the method can be applied to public goods in general. Further, a specific environmental policy may generate both positive and negative nonmarket values. This exploratory study investigates the presence of nonmarket values for maintaining the status quo land use...

In situations characterized by true uncertainty and potential irreversibility, the safe minimum standard (SMS) approach is a decision rule to protect some critical natural resource-unless the social costs of doing so are somehow "intolerable." The SMS has been discussed widely, but actual case studies remain rare. We present two case studies, focus...

Instream flow can be defined as the flow of water in its natural channels without diversion. Alone among the western US states, New Mexico (NM) fails to provide any mechanism for the protection of instream flows and has a long history of political resistance to any change in the status quo. Using the combined results from two statewide telephone su...

This contingent valuation (CV) study investigates the potential of cost-influenced responses in open-ended (OE) and dichotomous choice (DC) formats. For both formats we cross split-sample information treatments to provide: a total cost of the project treatment, a group-size treatment, a combined treatment, and the baseline control group. Investigat...

The research questions and topics most likely to emerge in the near term future are assessed. A common theme is that policy issues will be an important driving force, as has generally been true in the past. More specifically, future theoretical advances are expected to occur in the treatment of uncertainty, the incorporation of stock service flows...

Earthquakes generate a variety of economic impacts. To obtain a consistent measure, the actual damage state must be linked to the dollar losses of the capital stock, and then translated into direct business interruption losses and the ensuing ripple effects that occur throughout the economy. The Earthquake Loss Estimation Methodology (HAZUS) facili...

People frequently regard the landscape as part of a static system. The mountains and rivers that cross the landscape, and the bedrock that supports the surface, change little during the course of a lifetime. Society can alter the geologic history of an area and, in so doing, affect the occurrence and impact of environmental hazards. For example, ch...

When market transactions generate negative externalities, the injured party may initiate court action to prevent harm or to obtain compensation. The political response, in some cases, has been to broaden the set of agents who can intervene through the court, often by admitting entirely new categories of potential intervenors. We employ an experimen...

The focus of this special section are the problems and issues regarding water development in developing countries. A significant number of the populations in developing countries do not have access to satisfactory water supplies. This problem is especially acute in the rural areas. The planning process has routinely failed to lead to successful pro...

The focus of this special section is the conceptual and empirical issues regarding benefit transfer applications. A benefit transfer is the application of monetary values obtained from a particular nonmarket goods analysis to an alternative or secondary policy decision setting. The papers address the ongoing development of the procedures for benefi...

Short term earthquake prediction has become technically possible. However, the desirability of such predictions depends both on the probability of successfully predicting an event and on the odds of false predictions. This paper investigates the economic feasibility of earthquake prediction as a function of program performance for the Los Angeles a...

This article incorporates a political decision process into an urban land use model to predict the likely location of a public good. It fills an important gap in the literature by modeling the endogenous location of open space. The article compares open space decisions made under a majority-rules voting scheme with welfare-improving criterion and f...

Natural hazards in the form of landslides are pervasive throughout the United States. Efficient mitigation of natural hazards requires a spatial representation of the risk, based upon the geographic distribution of physical parameters and man-related development activities. Through such a representation, the spatial probability of landslides based...

The economic value of geologic hazards research and data can be estimated only if the information is used in ways that are associated with specific economic consequences, such as a decision whether or not to mitigate against a potential landslide hazard at a specific location. The economic benefits of a decision to mitigate are measured by the expe...

Manuscripts published in Water Resources Research have been divided into two general topical areas: one including hydrology, auwnd physical, chemical, and biological sciences; and another covering policy sciences— economics, systems analysis, sociology, and law. Beginning with the appointment of new editors in September 1988, there will be three to...

The focus of this special section is the conceptual and empirical issues associated with the development of water-based recreation benefit estimation methodologies. The papers address two themes in the ongoing development of modeling the demand for outdoor recreation. The issues of characterizing and estimating nonuse (existence) values are discuss...

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for estimating the costs as well as the benefits of adding earthquake resistance to buildings. The methodology draws upon the economic approach to valuing risks to life, as well as recent engineering and geological studies of earthquakes and the damage they cause. Our results should be useful bo...

This paper examines the parallelism which exists between demand behavior determined from the sale of a private good in an actual "real world"field setting and in a laboratory auction setting. The demand behavior observed in the two settings is significantly the same leading to the corroboration of the thesis that there is often correspondence betwe...

The problems associated with accurately measuring the value of a public good in an applied setting are considered. The values obtained from hypothetical elicitation procedures are compared and contrasted with those obtained in a marketplace. When hypothetical measurements are elicited in the field, buying-selling discrepancies similar to those pred...

The definitional issues and conceptual framework of existence value are explored. It is argued that existence value may have two components (1) an economic component that is consistent with utility maximizing behavior and (2) an ethical component that is inconsistent with normative benefit-cost assumptions. Issues as how to appropriately include a...

This paper examines the quantification of federal reserved water rights from legal, institutional, and economic perspectives. Special attention is directed toward Indian reserved water rights and the concept of practicably irrigable acreage. We conclude by examining current trends and exploring alternative approaches to the dilemma of quantifying I...

A Test of the Expected Utility Model : Evidence from Earthquake Risks

Explores the analytical structure of option price and existence value and develops a modification of the contingent valuation approach to estimate option price and existence value for specific natural resources whose future supply is uncertain. The empirical analysis explores the case of grizzly bear Ursus arctos and bighorn sheep Ovis canadensis w...

Economics plays a major role in the historically controversial Indian reserved water rights in which reserved rights differ from appropriated rights because Indian reservations predate other appropriated rights of settlers and miners. Other aspects of Indian reserved rights are their magnitude and their coexistence with the land regardless of use....