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Oil spill in a harbor, displacement of a wetland, flooding of coastal property. When the environment is damaged, there are social costs and economic impacts, including commercial losses, the cost of restoring the ecosystem, and the cost of monitoring that it is maintained in a functioning condition. There can be damage to fish, beaches, property values, and risks to public health, all of which need to be rendered into costs and values.
Federal policy calls for a range of expertise to assess the damage. A team assessing wetlands for extent of damage and cost of restoring them may include hydrologists, ecologists, and botanists. Professionals working on marine issues may include marine biologists, policy analysts, environmental lawyers, coastal ecologists, coastal engineers, and coastal managers. Many of these professionals do most of their work in isolation, with the result that team members from different disciplines may not fully understand the contributions of other team members.
To bridge the gaps among these professionals, Douglas D. Ofiara, assistant professor of public policy and management, and his coauthor J.J. Seneca have published a book that helps economists, environmentalists, and practitioners work together in assessing the costs of damage to marine environments. Their book, “Economic Losses from Marine Pollution: A Handbook for Assessment,” published last fall by Island Press, makes “an important and unique contribution to the literature,” according to a review in the journal Choice. The review continued, “By creating an accessible single volume that links principles and applications, the authors have created a handbook that should become a model for emulation in other fields.”
Ofiara is an economist who specializes in resource economics and the broad
area of public economics. Much of his current work focuses
on problems of resource allocation and environmental degradation.
Ofiara and Seneca use a step-by-step approach in “Economic
Losses from Marine Pollution,” with real-world examples that
make it a valuable resource to scientists, economists, lawyers,
and policy professionals concerned with the marine environment.
Damages and losses are identified in terms of biological effects
and injuries and then associated possible economic effects
and losses.
To familiarize public policy practitioners and legislators with procedures, the authors also include discussion of federal legislation and the legal elements of natural resource damage assessments. And they argue that federal policy should include a longer-term assessment of a restored site. In the usual process, a damage site is examined, figures are arrived at for value, a court order determines the amount to be spent for restoration, but no funds are earmarked for monitoring a reconstituted ecosystem over time to see if it functions as it should.
Ofiara, who holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, came to USM in September 2000 to teach in the Muskie School’s master’s and Ph.D. programs. A prolific researcher and author, Ofiara joined the Muskie School faculty because he wanted to get beyond pure economics to applied public policy. He is also a visiting scholar at the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University. Joseph J. Seneca is University vice president for academic affairs and professor of economics at Rutgers University.
Their book grew out of work from the late 1980s that involved assessments of marine degradation off New Jersey and New York, which they undertook at the request of the State University of New York and the New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium. Their final report from the project was submitted to Congress as part of the New York Bight Restoration Plan under the National Estuary Program of the EPA. Following this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked Ofiara and Seneca to do a general study of the economic effects of marine degradation. That final report, completed in 1990, pulled together biology and economics. When by the mid-90s, they hadn't seen any book broadly addressing the economics of marine damage in detailed analysis, they decided the 1990 report should be updated and extensively expanded into a book.
Further work Ofiara did for New Jersey in the mid-90s was the basis for his second book, coauthored with Norbert P. Psuty, due out this fall from Rutgers University Press. "Coastal Hazard Management: Lessons and Directions from New Jersey" integrates coastal sciences, public policy analysis, principles of land use planning, and hazard mitigation.
Before entering his Ph.D. program, Ofiara worked for the Bureau of Economic Research at Rutgers University, where he was assistant to the director from 1985 to 1990, then director, from 1987 to 1991, of the Bureau’s Resource and Environmental Economics Working Group. Previously, he had worked as a research coordinator at the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Georgia.
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