Yare River basin. The flood enhancement project would augment the returns to 

 on-farm drainage investment by farmers of the low-lying wetlands in the Yare 

 River basin. About 25,000 hectares of this region are below river level, and 

 these lowlands include some of the more important migratory waterfowl habitat 

 in Northern Europe. Also, these wetlands, though they no longer contain the 

 original flora of the region, are very beautiful and contain an assemblage of 

 flora that is highly prized throughout England, 



The authors show that the private returns to on-farm drainage of the 

 wetlands will range between 35% and 65% (if the Yare Barrier is built). However, 

 the social returns to drainage are far lower than the private returns. The 

 social cost to drainage must net out the cost of the crop price support for wheat 

 (the most profitable agricultural crop for the potentially highly productive 

 soils of the region) and the cost of maintenance and construction of the flood 

 control structures. Also, certain other social costs must be incurred, including 

 the construction of roads and the capital costs of the regional drainage systems. 

 The farmers do not actually incur regional drainage system costs in these private 

 return calculations; moreover, drainage investments undertaken by individual 

 entrepreneurs are heavily subsidized. 



The total impact of these effects is to lower the net social rate of return 

 on these investment projects below 5%. The moral of the story is that social 

 and private benefits of wetlands drainage projects can diverge markedly. 

 However, if private benefits are high, development pressures will also be high. 



66. Bardacki, M.J. 1984. What value wetlands? Journal of Soil and Water 

 Conservation 34(3) :166-169. 



Bardecki argues that wetlands provide important wildlife habitat benefits. 

 However, he believes that they may not provide significant flood protection or 

 groundwater recharge benefits. Bardecki strongly defends the notion that 

 wetlands significantly enhance water quality, though the use of wetlands for 

 tertiary treatment of wastewater may be limited by the inability of the wetland 

 plants to withstand the stresses imposed by the pollution load. Bardecki asserts 

 that almost all creditable economic analyses of wetland preservation benefits 

 and private returns show a great disparity between the social and private 

 benei^its provided by wetlands. More precisely, he states that numerous studies 

 have shown that the private returns to wetland ownership are less than 20% of 

 the total value of the social benefits provided by wetlands. This discrepancy 

 between social and private returns gives rise to a marked tendency for the 

 resource to be mi sal located by purely market forces. 



67. Leitch, J. A., K.W. Easter, and W.C. Nelson. 1984. A proposed framework 

 for developing a multidiscipl inary wetlands valuation model. The 

 Environment Professional 6:117-124. 



This is a complicated article. Leitch et al . develop complex flowcharts 

 for analyzing relations between wetlands and various policy instruments. The 

 authors propose that a research team composed of physical scientists and social 

 scientists define and estimate production and ecologic relations for wetlands, 

 and that this study team define the relevant socioeconomic uses of the various 

 wetlands outputs and uses. Other proposed topics for the study team include the 



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