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Controlling Non-additional Credits from Nutrient Management in Water Quality Trading Programs Through Eligibility Baseline Stringency

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  • Savage, Jeffrey
  • Ribaudo, Marc

Abstract

A concern for any program that offers payment for environmental services is that those services be additional. Non-additional services are those that would have been provided without the payment. One source of non-additionality is farmer misrepresentation of their pre-program management. Farm management practices are often difficult to observe, particularly those that do not involve structural changes, such as nutrient management. If practices are difficult to observe, management oversight lax, and enforcement weak, the farmer has an incentive to provide biased information that increases the likelihood that he will receive a more favorable baseline for calculating services created, and a larger payment. This is a moral hazard problem. The presence of non-additional credits in a water quality trading program can result in the degradation of water quality. Point source discharges above permitted levels are replaced by equivalent reductions from unregulated nonpoint sources. If the abatement that point sources purchase from nonpoint sources is non-additional, discharges will be higher than if the abatement was truly additional. Preventing non-additional credits from entering a water quality trading market is one of the goals of program design. In this paper we assess how program eligibility baseline choice affects the incentive to misrepresent baseline nutrient management practices using data from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

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  • Savage, Jeffrey & Ribaudo, Marc, 2014. "Controlling Non-additional Credits from Nutrient Management in Water Quality Trading Programs Through Eligibility Baseline Stringency," 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota 170426, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea14:170426
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.170426
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    Cited by:

    1. Hao Wang & Sander Meijerink & Erwin van der Krabben, 2020. "Institutional Design and Performance of Markets for Watershed Ecosystem Services: A Systematic Literature Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(16), pages 1-26, August.
    2. Nielsen, Rasmus & Hoff, Ayoe & Waldo, Staffan & Hammarlund, Cecilia & Virtanen, Jarno, 2019. "Fishing for nutrients – economic effects of fisheries management targeting eutrophication in the Baltic Sea," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 156-167.
    3. Fleming, Patrick & Lichtenberg, Erik & Newburn, David, 2018. "Water Quality Trading Program Design with Heterogeneous Behavioral Responses," 2018 Annual Meeting, August 5-7, Washington, D.C. 274429, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    4. Meyer, Andrew G. & Raff, Zach, 2022. "Pass-through of water pollution regulation: Evidence from sewer utility bills and Wisconsin's phosphorus rule," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322444, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    5. Caela O'Connell & Marzieh Motallebi & Deanna L. Osmond & Dana L. K. Hoag, 2017. "Trading on risk: The moral logics and economic reasoning of North Carolina farmers in water quality trading markets," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 4(2), pages 225-238, June.
    6. Nicholas J Pates & Nathan P Hendricks, 2020. "Additionality from Payments for Environmental Services with Technology Diffusion," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(1), pages 281-299, January.
    7. Lin, Yongsheng & Dong, Zhanfeng & Zhang, Wei & Zhang, Hongyu, 2020. "Estimating inter-regional payments for ecosystem services: Taking China’s Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as an example," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).

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