Estimating the benefits of water quality improvements under the Water Framework Directive: are benefits transferable?

The Water Framework Directive sets an objective of ‘Good Ecological Status’ for water bodies across the EU. Non-point pollution from agriculture is a major reason for the failure of rivers in the UK to meet this target. In this paper, we use choice experiment methodology to test the transferability of benefit estimates of water quality improvements for two small catchments where agricultural-source non-point pollution and irrigation water abstraction are the main threats to ecological status. We also investigate the most appropriate techniques to apply to transfer testing, including allowing for correlation between preferences for environmental attributes, and testing for acceptable differences between transferred and original values.