Best Management Practices and Nutrient Reduction: An Integrated Economic-Hydrological Model of the Western Lake Erie Basin

We develop the first spatially integrated economic-hydrological model of the western Lake Erie basin explicitly linking economic models of farmers' field-level Best Management Practice (BMP) adoption choices with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to evaluate nutrient management policy cost-effectiveness. We quantify tradeoffs among phosphorus reduction policies and find that a hybrid policy coupling a fertilizer tax with cost-share payments for subsurface placement is the most cost-effective, and when implemented with a 200% tax can achieve the stated policy goal of 40% reduction in nutrient loadings. We also find economic adoption models alone can overstate the potential for BMPs to reduce nutrient loadings by ignoring biophysical complexities. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)