Glen Canyon Dam adaptive management program. - Living Rivers

Downstream: Adaptive Management of Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River Ecosystem
http://www nap.edu/openbook/0309065798/html/l12.html, copyright, 2000 The National Academy of Sciences, all rights reserved
112 Downstream: Adaptive Management
economics has greatly expanded, and a variety of methodologies designed
to measure the social values associated with environmental services have
been developed.
Weaknesses and Alternative Approaches
Grand Canyon management can be intuitively reduced to a set of
decisions about how the Canyon's resources are to be allocated or
reallocated. As mentioned above, gains and losses for any allocation decision
must be compared. Weighing gains against losses across different
groups of people requires that some common metric be chosen so that the
units are comparable. Because losses (costs) are counted in dollars, it is
common to try to convert gains (benefits) into dollar terms as well. It is
not necessary to choose money as the metric, but because costs are usually
in dollars, dollars are typically selected as the measure.
There is a natural tendency for many to want to avoid explicitly
converting the gains into dollars, especially when environmental goods are
involved. Unless this is done, however, explicitly or implicitly, the
necessary weighing of gains and losses will involve comparing "apples
and oranges." Decision-making is paralyzed until some such comparison
is explicitly or implicitly made. At the point where some resource
reallocation decision is finally made, it can be inferred that somebody has
undertaken to make the conversion, even if only implicitly. It is generally
preferable to force transparency upon the decision process by insisting that
participants make explicit their assessments of benefits as well as costs.
In many decision-making contexts, including the present one,
formal analysis seems to end with an inventory of probable effects of
some proposed (or recent) change measured in different physical terms
(e.g., a decrease of 10 percent in the population of humpback chub, an
increase of 15 percent in the population of rainbow trout, and an increase
of 3 percent in average annual electricity prices). It is then left to the
ultimate decision-maker to infer which of these physical effects is a gain
and which is a loss, who the winners and losers are, and by how much
each winner or loser values these effects. These social benefit and cost
calculations are typically done informally, without the support of sufficient
quantitative research and in sharp contrast to the rigor with which
many of the precipitating physical effects are measured.
What needs to be done, and what are the prospects for doing it