Measuring and managing ecological and amenity outcomes in urban waterways

There is extensive research to show that humans can benefit in different ways from access to natural landscapes, including access to waterways. However, the rapid pace of urbanization across the globe and changes in the way humans access natural environments makes understanding those benefits increasingly important and also challenging. This study uses a choice experiment to investigate and enumerate the non-market values of waterways in Australia’s fastest growing city, Melbourne. The study adds to our understanding of the different values urban residents assign to waterways in developed urban landscapes. Accordingly, the work offers an extension to the emerging ‘bluespace’ literature. The approach used in the choice experiment also offers a novel way to measure different values within a single experiment. More specifically, a mixed logit model is used to separately and jointly estimate the amenity and ecological values placed on Melbourne’s urban waterways. The estimates generated by this study provide a basis for comparing management and policy options as well as guiding economic regulation. The data gathered support the view that managers need to give significant weight to the ecological value of waterways if they seek to raise the welfare of residents. Moreover, we show that adding amenity alone to urban waterways may be a poor substitute for any foregone ecological values.