Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 116, Issue 12, Pages 5262-5269Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802870115
Keywords
water pollution; Clean Water Act; cost-benefit analysis; cost effectiveness analysis; environmental regulation
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Funding
- US Department of Agriculture through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch Project [IOW03909, 2014-51130-22494]
- National Science Foundation [SES-1530494]
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US investment to decrease pollution in rivers, lakes, and other surface waters has exceeded $1.9 trillion since 1960, and has also exceeded the cost of most other US environmental initiatives. These investments come both from the 1972 Clean Water Act and the largely voluntary efforts to control pollution from agriculture and urban runoff. This paper reviews the methods and conclusions of about 20 recent evaluations of these policies. Surprisingly, most analyses estimate that these policies' benefits are much smaller than their costs; the benefit-cost ratio from the median study is 0.37. However, existing evidence is limited and undercounts many types of benefits. We conclude that it is unclear whether many of these regulations truly fail a benefit-cost test or whether existing evidence understates their net benefits; we also describe specific questions that when answered would help eliminate this uncertainty.
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