John Duffield

John Duffield

John Duffield is a natural resource economist at the University of Montana, where he has taught and conducted research for the last 35 years. John has contributed to the development and application of tools for the economic valuation of nonmarket resources such as fish, wildlife, recreation, and other ecosystem services. This work has helped inform public policy decisions that require weighing production of marketed goods, such as hydropower, irrigated agriculture, or mineral resources, against potentially foregone environmental services, such as fisheries, clean air, or biodiversity. Applications include critical habitat analysis for bull trout and piping plover, evaluation of proposed dams on the American, Klamath, and Kootenai Rivers, wolf recovery in Central Idaho and Yellowstone, and water right allocation in the Upper Missouri. John was a member of the NAS/NRC panel on bear and wolf management in Alaska, and has participated in a number of significant natural resource damage cases, including ARCO v. Montana. He also served as the lead economist for the Alaska Native class in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case. A current project is evaluation of the impacts of Glen Canyon Dam on ecosystem services in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. A long-term interest is in valuing cultural and natural resources in the tribal context, including work for the Penobscot, Salish-Kootenai, Klamath, Elem Pomo, Ute Mountain Ute, and Spokane Tribes.  John was born and raised in Montana, and received a PhD in economics from Yale (1974) and a BA (economics and math) from Northwestern (1968).

Abstract: Valuing Ecosystem Services in River and Lake Systems: Methods and Case Studies from the Western US, including Mono Lake, California.

A primary threat to the long-term sustainability of aquatic ecosystems in the Western United States is from water resource development, particularly from hydroelectric power dams and extractive water uses such as irrigation, municipal, and industrial uses. In the future, climate change is likely to exacerbate the competition for scarce water resources. This presentation outlines the use of nonmarket valuation tools to help inform efficient and fair allocation of water resources between environmental services, such as biodiversity and recreation, and extractive uses. Human uses of riverine and lacustrine ecosystem services fall into two general classes: direct uses such as fishing, hunting, boating, or wildlife observation, and passive uses that may be motivated by existence or bequest motives, such as the desire to conserve endangered species and unique environments for future generations. Examples where changes in water quality or quantity affect direct use will be discussed, including instream flows to benefit fisheries on Montana’s Big Hole and Bitterroot Rivers, and the effect of lake level changes on visitor use at Lake Powell. Passive use valuation cases include the evaluation of dam removal on the Elwah River, and increased inflows to Mono Lake. The latter is a saline system, and the economics of that case have some similarity to resource allocation issues for the Great Salt Lake.

Promontory Mountains from Bear River Refuge, October - by Sean Toomey