Assessing the Effects of Urban Stormwater Management on the Social Wellbeing Communities Derive from Coastal Waterbodies

This paper addresses the conference topic of interest “Sustaining and valuing the environment”. In the course of our research we have encountered comments from stormwater professionals around the theme “It would be good to be able to value the difference that stormwater management makes to the condition of receiving water bodies”. We discuss a new approach that contributes to the indicator suite of the stormwater decision support tool “Urban Planning that Sustains Waterbodies” (UPSW). Many professionals are uncomfortable with monetary methods to value the environment. Acknowledging the need for alternative ways of assessing environmental costs and benefits, we have developed a complementary method linking the concepts of experienced utility and ecosystem service provision. Experienced utility is the satisfaction that arises - as opposed to that anticipated - from an experience or decision. Ecosystem services are the benefits humankind derives from ecosystems. Examples are provisioning, regulation, supporting and cultural ecosystem services. This implementation of experienced utility modelling addresses the question, “How are a community’s freedoms and capacities to undertake the things they value in and around urban coastal water bodies impacted by alternate catchment stormwater management approaches?” In the context of provisioning ecosystem service delivery by urban coastal water bodies we focus on experienced utility as an assessment tool, and the development of a method to collect and validate the data that informs the UPSW social wellbeing indicator. We describe the outcomes of recent research that supports the use of experienced utility data to identify vulnerabilities in cultural (amenity) and provisioning (food gathering) ecosystem service delivery by coastal waterbodies.