Environmental and economic impact assessment of river restoration in Switzerland

Croatian association of freshwater ecologists invites you to a talk entitled: Environmental and economic impact assessment of river restoration in Switzerland that will be held on Thursday, June 7, 2017 at 16:30 in the lecture room BO1, at the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Rooseveltov trg 6, by our guest speaker dr. sc. Ivana Logar from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), which is a part of the ETH (Zürich) domain.

Abstract:
In Switzerland there are plans to implement large-scale river restoration measures over the next several decades. Despite this, a lack of both environmental and economic impact assessments of river restoration projects has been identified. This paper aims at closing these gaps by assessing the ecological effects of river restoration measures and estimating economic values of the resulting improvements in river ecosystem services. The former objective is achieved by carrying out on-site measurements of the physical, chemical and biological states of two different rivers. The latter goal is fulfilled by conducting a survey among the local residents. The survey applies stated preference methods (choice experiment and contingent valuation) to elicit people’s willingness to pay for further restoration projects at these two rivers. Moreover, we test for the existence and measure the extent of distance-decay and substitution effects between the two rivers.

Photo sourcess: swisstopo:5704 000 000/Swissimage@2011, reproduced with the permission of swisstopo/JA100119