Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability

Lecture Title: The Social Cost of Water Pollution

Abstract: In this work, we develop a national scale Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) for nutrient pollution into the surface waters of the continental U.S. that reflects the physical and social heterogeneity of damages by connecting sources of effluent across the landscape with their local and downstream impacts on water quality and social damages. We adopt a bottoms-up strategy informed by micro-theoretic foundations and drawn on multiple empirical methods from the nonmarket valuation literature to estimates individual social cost components. Marginal and gross economic damages are presented at the national level.

Catherine L. Kling is a Tisch University Professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, member of the Brooks School of Public Policy, and faculty director at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University.

She is past director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University where she also held the President's Chair in Environmental Economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Kling has published over 100 refereed journal articles and has been PI or co-PI on over $15 million in grants.

Dr. Kling specializes in the economic valuation of ecosystem services, water quality concerns, and interdisciplinary integrated assessment modeling. Kling chairs the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and past editor of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. She is an elected fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resources Economists, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. She served for ten years on EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

Read more about Catherine Kling.