Animal Waste, Water Quality and Human Health

456Animal Waste, Water Quality and Human Health12.5 CONCLUSIONSThis purpose of this chapter has been to consider the economic evaluation ofinterventions concerned with the contamination of recreational and other watersby microbial pollution from livestock waste. Policy makers and regulators face anumber of dilemmas in the regulation of livestock waste contamination ofrecreational and other waters. Regulators and governments have to balance thepublic desire for better environmental quality with the opportunity costs of anyactions as well as considering the economic impact of policy changes on boththose who have to pay the costs of interventions and those responsible formaintaining water quality.Although the economics of reducing animal derived pathogens and faecalindicator organism loads has not been adequately researched and quantifieddirectly, a parallel exists for recreational waters impacted by a mix of humanand animal loads. This chapter has outlined some of the concepts and issuesrelevant to undertaking a systematic evaluation of costs and benefits, as well asreviewing some of the literature on the application of economic valuationmethods to the issue of recreational bathing waters. Given the relative scarcityof resources any decision regarding allocation of resources to the managementof livestock wastes implies foregoing something else. Economic analysis andevaluation is an important tool in helping policy makers understand the balancebetween society’s desire for better environmental quality and human health withthe costs of actions necessary to achieve this objective.While health clearly is a ‘right’, economics establishes the incontrovertible factthat such rights come at a cost. Costs mean sacrificing scarce resources and this inturn implies that something else of benefit could have been secured. What mattersis that the decisions about levels of expenditure on preventing and mitigating theeffects of livestock contamination of water quality are optimally informed.Economic analysis can support this process by indicating and providing insightinto: the costs and benefits of an intervention; the potential for finding morecost-effective ways of securing a given objective; eliciting the ways in whichsociety values risks so that risk, cost and benefit can be more transparentlyanalysed.The case study example demonstrates the use of such economic analysis to thecase of bacteriological water contamination of recreational bathing waters in theNetherlands. The case study showed how costs and benefits can be estimated inorder to help policy makers and regulators decide on whether expenditures onreducing the contamination of recreational waters represent effective andefficient use of resources. Although based on a number of assumptions with asignificant degree of uncertainty attached to them, it shows that it is