Updated September 2013. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.

Moving Forward to Address Challenges Identified in the Study

In 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation, in partnership with the seven Colorado River Basin States, published the most comprehensive study of future supplies and demands on the Colorado River ever undertaken. The Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study confirmed what most experts knew: there are likely to be significant shortfalls between projected water supplies and demands in the Colorado River Basin in coming decades.

On May 28, 2013, Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Anne Castle and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael L. Connor convened key stakeholders representing the Basin States, Native American Tribes, and the conservation community to discuss the future of the Colorado River Basin. The Moving Forward event in San Diego, California, identified next steps to address actions identified in the Study.

Those who rely on the Colorado River and its tributaries are committed to approaching these future challenges with the same steadfastness that they have approached and overcome past challenges. Following the call to action of the Study and as a first step in that commitment, all that rely on the Colorado are taking initial steps — working together — to identify positive solutions that can be implemented to meet the challenges ahead.

Next Steps - Phase 1

Phase 1 of the Next Steps activities includes the formation of a Coordination Team and three Workgroups with members who represent federal, state, tribal, agricultural, municipal, hydropower, environmental and recreational interests. The Coordination Team directs and reviews the efforts of the three workgroups, which are listed below. Each workgroup consists of members with subject-matter expertise from various entities in an effort to bring important and varying perspectives to build on collaborative findings to pursue the next steps identified in the Study.

• Municipal and Industrial Conservation and Water Reuse Workgroup
• Agricultural Conservation, Productivity and Water Transfers Workgroup
• Environmental and Recreational Flows Workgroup

Arizona has five Cs: copper, cattle, citrus, climate and cotton. In September's Green Living AZ Magazine, the latest in cotton research, farmer livelihood, and climate change impacts are highlighted by Michelle Talsma Everson. In the article, Sustainability Scientist Hallie Eakin shares insights from her research on water management by cotton farmers.

"The cotton farmers who have stuck it out in the industry are pretty committed to being here," Eakin says. "They of course want cotton farming to continue, and this study can help address what that means for water availability, electricity, and more."

The researchers hope this study will alleviate any misconceived notions about cotton farmers, and assist cotton growers, policy makers, and urban planners in water conservation and sustainable agriculture in Arizona's arid climate.

Honors students in Senior Sustainability Scientist David Pijawka's course will have their research photographs and videos displayed in October's Biophilic Cities Launch exhibit.

Pijawka's course, Sustainable Cities, focused on sustainability issues within urban cities. The honors students explored Valley locations and analyzed their "biophilic," or natural designs. Biophilia, a concept popularized by ecologist E.O. Wilson, suggests that humans have an innate connection to nature and need it to be happy and healthy. Cities apply biophilia to design buildings, parks, preserves, and residences.

"Biophilia is a 'hook' for sustainability; students often engage with this concept really quickly because they can think about themselves and how nature plays a role in their life," says Dorothy Trippel, Pijawka's teaching assistant and a graduate of the School of Sustainability.

The exhibit will take place on October 17-20 at the University of Virginia.

Senior Sustainability Scientist and engineer Mikhail Chester is teaming with experts from University of California, Los Angeles to study Phoenix and LA's susceptibility to rising temperatures. Specific at-risk communities usually fall in the low-income areas, where people have poor access to air conditioning, clean water, and shade.

The ASU/UCLA team is particularly interested in how urban infrastructure can help alleviate the negative side effects of increasing urban temperatures. The National Science Foundation is funding the research, awarding $480,000 over the next four years. The researchers hope they will find very specific construction and design methods that can protect people from the threat of heat.

In his latest column for The Arizona Republic, Sethuraman "Panch" Panchanathan discusses biomimicry, or the process and study of using nature to inspire practical solutions to everyday problems. Panchanathan is the senior vice president for ASU's Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development.

In his article, Panchanathan describes the research Arizona State University engineers, biologists, and computer scientists are doing with biomimicry.

"Researchers in ASU’s Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis are studying nature’s original clean-energy solution — photosynthesis," says Panchanathan. "The ASU scientists are analyzing the biochemistry of photosynthesis in order to design new systems for harvesting solar energy and converting light into fuel."

ASU’s Biodesign Institute kicked off the Fall 2013 semester by hosting an interesting lecture featuring the research findings of Assistant Professor Candace K. Chan of ASU’s School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy (SEMTE).

Continue Reading

Quasi Experiments, Hedonic Models, and Estimating Trade-offs for Local Amenities

Authors

H. Allen Klaiber and V. Kerry Smith.

Journal

Land Economics, Volume 89, Number 3, August 2013

Abstract

This paper evaluates whether the property value capitalization effects measured with quasi-experimental methods offer reliable estimates of willingness to pay for changes in amenities. We propose the use of a market simulation as a robustness check. Two applications establish the method’s relevance. The first examines the conversion of land cover from desert to wet landscape. The second examines cleanup of hazardous waste sites. We find that even when quasi-experimental methods have access to ideal instruments, their performance in measuring general equilibrium willingness to pay cannot be assumed ideal. It needs to be evaluated considering the specific features of each application.

Introduction

There is a fundamental distinction between estimating the effect of a policy that influences the value of a parcel on that land’s price and estimating what an individual would be willing to pay to obtain the policy. This issue is important to nearly all of the reduced form quasi-experimental (QE) and hedonic property value analyses conducted over the past decade. This distinction arises because the source of identifying information used to avoid biases in hedonic estimates that can arise from omitted variables and sorting behavior is not neutral to the economic interpretation of what is measured.1 Two approaches have been used to evaluate the empirical significance of this logical distinction in recovering estimates of economic trade-offs associated with a change in a nonmarket service. The first uses analytical models to describe the properties of these trade-off estimates, using the evaluation logic often associated with quasi experiments.2 The second approach uses simulation methods to evaluate the quantitative importance of distinguishing specific types of changes in site-specific amenities and [End Page 413] compares the evaluation logic to conventional cross-sectional hedonic methods.

The theoretical analysis by Kuminoff and Pope (2012) is an example of the first strategy. They adapt the Tinbergen-and-Jan-1959Tinbergen (1959)-Epple (1987) description of the features of a hedonic price function to describe a hedonic equilibrium. With this model they demonstrate that for an infinitesimal, exogenous change in a spatial attribute, conveyed with a house, the prechange and postchange marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) measures will be equal and correspond to the incremental price capitalization. However, in other situations the price differential associated with capitalization may not correspond to either the prechange or the postchange MWTP. In evaluating policies that are inherently nonmarginal, the close relationship between capitalization and willingness to pay (WTP) may not hold. In the current paper, we use simulation methods originating in the logic developed by Cropper, Deck, and McConnell (1988) and Kuminoff, Parameter, and Pope (2010) to provide a strategy for developing an understanding of this relationship as it arises in each specific type of application. An economic model, calibrated to a specific market, is used to simulate different hedonic equilibria and then to evaluate the performance of conventional cross-sectional hedonic models and methods based on the logic of program evaluation for estimating specific trade-offs people would make in response to changes in spatially varying amenities.

Our analysis complements the existing hedonic simulation papers and extends them to demonstrate how a market simulation can serve as a robustness check on the maintained assumptions of the evaluation logic when it is used to develop measures in property value applications of the trade-offs a person would make to secure more of a desirable amenity. For small changes, analysts have interpreted these measures as point estimates of the MWTP. For large, discrete changes associated with some applications of the evaluation framework, the appropriate interpretation of these measures is a topic of debate. Our analysis provides additional guidance on the interpretation of these measures. We focus on situations where the measure of interest is the general equilibrium willingness to pay (GE WTP) for changes in amenities, which is often the goal of policy analysis. We present two examples to illustrate the importance of a simulation check. Our findings in these examples imply that quasi experiments that are routinely a part of the evaluation logic can have large errors when their estimates of price capitalization are treated as estimates of WTP. We also find that the use of instruments with cross-sectional hedonic modeling can improve the quality of the estimates for the WTP for discrete changes in amenities. This is true even when the changes are large enough to induce re-sorting and result in a new hedonic price function. Finally, we find that the context for each application matters, so that general conclusions about robust strategies for estimating GE WTP do not follow; and therefore, it would be prudent to consider the use of similar simulations as a complement to empirical research on a case-by-case basis.

Continue reading the article at Land Economics. Subscription may be required.

Participants are invited to scale up their knowledge of algae growth and management Nov. 4-8 at the Algae Testbed Public-Private-Partnership (ATP3) fall workshop on Large-Scale Algal Cultivation, Harvesting, and Downstream Processing. The weeklong workshop will take place at the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation, the leading ATP3 testbed site at the ASU Polytechnic campus. To sign up for the workshop, visit atp3.org/education.

The workshop will cover the practical applications of growing and managing microalgal cultures at production scale. ATP3 is a network of 12 agencies, which range from private industries to educational institutions and national labs, funded through a $15 million grant from the US Department of Energy.

Arizona's official state bird is the cactus wren, just one of the many animals that call the Sonoran Desert home. On October 19, the Arizona Chapter of The Wildlife Society will present the Wildlife First Symposium, sponsored by Arizona State University’s College of Technology and Innovation.

The symposium aims to gather wildlife experts and interested community members to discuss conservation efforts for native Sonoran Desert wildlife. The event will feature numerous speakers from ASU, as well as from various organizations such as the Arizona Elk Society, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Bureau of Land Management, The Center of Biological Diversity, and others.

Register now at http://www.aztws.org.

A new event series called “Arts and Humanities in Sustainability" will explore the human connection and place in relation to the natural world, as well as integrate different sets of knowledge to ultimately find new solutions for a sustainable future.

"The goal of this new series is to demonstrate the impact the arts and humanities have on sustainability," says Ann Kinzig, a series co-creator, senior sustainability scientist in Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, and professor in the School of Life Sciences. "Many sustainability challenges have no easy solutions.This means we have to go well beyond science to understand how people see the world, relate to it, and imagine what it could be."

The Global Institute of Sustainability partners with the Institute of Humanities Research, ASU Art Museum, and Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts to sponsor the series that examines sustainability concepts through a diverse range of ideas, emotions, actions, and contexts.

John Sabo, director of research development for ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, recently published an article with Robert Glennon in the journal Solutions that outlines the very imminent threat of water scarcity in the western U.S.

"To grasp the scale of water scarcity in the West, consider that earth fissures have opened up in Arizona from excessive groundwater pumping," the authors write. "In Southern California, lack of water has prompted the cancellation of scores of commercial and residential construction projects."

Despite low supplies, farmers, meat suppliers, and other water users are still guzzling water at a higher pace. Sabo and Glennon warn of the imbalance between supply and demand, suggesting increased residential tap water rates to improve infrastructure and revision and expansion of the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs) to offset costs.

Arizona State University and Sandia National Laboratories have signed a memorandum of understanding to encourage collaborative research, build educational and workforce development programs, and inform policy endeavors for renewable energy. The potential areas of focus are solar hybrid fuels, solar thermochemical fuels, concentrating solar technologies, photovoltaics, electric grid modernization and algae-based biofuels.

"As the largest university in the nation and the largest of the national laboratories, we have high expectations for our future efforts under this partnership," said Gary Dirks, director of LightWorks and the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU.

Sandia National Laboratories is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) using science and engineering to provide solutions for national security and innovative technology.

Andrea Baty, a School of Sustainability master's graduate, recently became VF Corporation's newest sustainability coordinator. VF Corporation is an $11-billion clothing company that includes brands like Nautica, Wrangler, Kipling, and The North Face. Baty joins the Sportswear division, working with the Nautica and Kipling teams.

As the sustainability coordinator, Baty designs employee education programs, organizes volunteer events, develops a sustainability strategy for both brands, and presents on corporate sustainability.

"My duties allow me to see the impact of shifting a company to more sustainable operations," Baty says. "There is a large effect of one company’s operations that ripples down to supply chains and people."

The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and the Green Sports Alliance has named Arizona State University's Sun Devil Athletics a top 10 athletic department working towards sustainability.

"Progress toward sustainability requires the reconceptualization and reorganization of all of university enterprises," said ASU President Michael Crow. "Nowhere is this more visible than in athletics, where the interaction between the university and its constituents is most public."

Sun Devil Athletics has nine athletic-specific solar installations that generate about 7.5-megawatt hours of electricity each year, the most of any university athletic department in the country. The nine solar power systems are part of ASU's current 72 collective systems across all four campuses.

As a sophomore, Arnaud is combining his sustainability studies with urban planning. He hopes he can become a helpful communicator between oil, gas, and alternative energy companies. Arnaud believes when we all work together, we can help alleviate the negative effects of fossil fuel consumption and pollution. Now living in Arizona, he wants to explore solar power at the School of Sustainability. "Phoenix is hot and sunny so we might as well have solar power," Arnaud says.