Evaluating Water Quality for City of Stockholm

Situation

The Swedish capital is internationally well-known for its waters, and the City of Stockholm’s Environment and Health Administration wanted to understand the economic value of achieving good water quality in all inland waters in the city, as defined by the EU Water Framework Directive. The client was also interested in the relationship between the costs of necessary measures to reach good water quality, and the resulting benefits. Anthesis were engaged to provide a monetary valuation of all benefits associated with these waters.

Solution

Anthesis carried out a large scale, web-based survey targeted at the general public of Stockholm. The survey informed participants of the current environmental status of the city’s inland waters and asked what they would be willing to pay to achieve good water quality status. From this, we used established valuation methodology to estimate the monetary benefits of improving water quality, versus the costs of the interventions needed to achieve it.

The goal of the project was to leverage combined data and tools to develop a holistic picture of basin risk within the area combined with facility-level water consumption data to enable target setting and improvement planning. Anthesis produced this analysis by using these four resources:

• Global datasets from the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas and Flood Risk Analyzer tools.
• Higg FEM 3.0 apparel facility data, a Sustainable Apparel Coalition tool that enables brands, retailers, and facilities to accurately measure and score a company or product’s sustainability performance.
• Basin-level assessments from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).
• Information from facility data forms.

Impact

The outcome was an estimated economic value of SEK 2.5 – 2.8 billion, indicating socio-economic profitability and positive public response and media attention.