Making More Informed Decisions in Your Watershed When Dollars Aren't Enough

摘要

Decisions regarding potential investments in watershed resources can leavedecision making comparing 'apples to oranges' when the costs of watershed improvements are measurable in dollars but the benefits are not. While traditional benefit cost analysis simply won't work in these situations, the tools of cost effectiveness analysis and incremental cost analysis can help by providing information to support decision making. This paper presents a general analytical procedure for cost effectiveness and incremental cost analyses, and three example applications. The examples demonstrate the procedures applicability to planning for investments in a variety of resources as well as problem solving situations of different complexities.