Economic Assessment of Competing Technologies for Coastal Restoration. Selected Paper Prepared for Presentation at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Birmingham, AL, February 4-7, 2012.

摘要

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) was established in an attempt to integrate programs for habitat restoration and infrastructure protection. The Authority has begun aligning the state's coastal spending to reflect increasing public interest in the aggressive restoration of surface acreage. Concurrent with this change, there has been increased public interest on rapid land building (RLB) techniques that rely on mechanical dredges and sediment conveyance pipelines for marsh creation. To some degree, this more aggressive approach to restoration is indicative of the recognition that time is a major limiting factor in addressing land loss in coastal Louisiana. Given increasing support for aggressive restoration, the costs and benefits of RLB projects are increasingly compared to the more 'natural' method of fresh water/sediment diversions (DIV). Such cost-benefit comparisons are central to the ideological and economic debate over which restoration technique provides the most sustainable and cost-effective provision of ecological services. Petrolia et al. (2009) explored measures of cost-effectiveness for land building technologies, focusing primarily on the sediment dredging costs associated with increases in project acreage. This research extends that analysis by incorporating time and risk considerations into cost-benefit comparisons of RLB and DIV projects for wetland restoration in Louisiana.