A Framework for River Cleanup Decision Making

The Neponset River drains a landscape that has been disturbed by human beings for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. The watershed is now intensely developed and modified to accommodate built environments. Deliberations regarding restoration and cleanup of the Neponset (and other rivers in urban landscapes) will benefit from a set of principles to guide activities and a decision context to provide a framework for competing considerations. This paper proposes a draft suite of eight principles that, together, offer social, scientific, and engineering foundations for decision making. Those principles are consolid ated in a decision model incorporating trade offs among the value of the habitat in place, the potential value of restoration activities, habitat destruction inherent in remediation technologies, risks associated with exposure to indust rial chemicals now in the ecosystem, and the potential risk-reduction benefits of chemical remediation. We conclude that optimal management decisions must account for and balance the considerations inherent in each of these decision categories.