Currently, about 90% of New York City’s drinking water comes from the Catskill-Delaware watershed system west of the Hudson River. The area encompasses most of the Catskill Mountains, a rural area of farms, forests, small towns and a growing number of vacation home developments. Unlike most other major metropolitan cities with surface water systems, until the last quarter of the 20th century, New York had been able to avoid the enormous expense of building filtration works to treat and purify its drinking water.
In the recent decades, the Catskill-Delaware area has become much more developed and agriculture-heavy, which has been negatively impacting the watershed system that Upstate and Downstate stakeholders relied on. The City decided that instead of paying to clean up the results of polluting and degrading the pure water producing Catskill watershed, it would pay to protect the rural Catskill environment that was providing it with the world’s best urban drinking water. It wanted to continue to use the ecosystem services that the Catskills provided and preserve them so that it would not have to spend billions on a filtration plant.
Ecosystem services not only produce superior environmental and social results, it produces them far more cheaply than traditional environmental strategies. Therefore, investing in the City’s watershed environment, both its natural and human resources, was the best way to insure the City a long-term source of pure drinking water. Ecosystem services are potential profit centers, not cost centers, so the protection of these services is environmentally and financially beneficial for Upstate and Downstate New Yorkers. It is clearly observed and calculated that the cost of creating a filtration plant and maintaining it would cost the city billions of dollars, while protecting land and using it for its ecosystem services costs much less and results in a higher water quality for all.
If existing institutional structures and existing patterns of environmental regulation and investment do not allow for those environmental benefits to be obtained, those economic profits to be realized, then we need to create new ones, using the political capital that getting something better for less always creates. This entire watershed system that New York has in place shows the value of identifying and targeting a high level of ecosystem services, since the higher the level of service the level of economic benefit. It is clear that maintaining the current system of New York’s watershed program is beneficial for both Upstate and Downstate stakeholders since it provides everyone with clean drinking water while minimizing expenses.
Source: Appleton, Albert F. “How New York City Used an Ecosystem Services Strategy Carried out Through an Urban-Rural Partnership to Preserve the Pristine Quality of Its Drinking Water and Save Billions of Dollars and What Lessons It Teaches about Using Ecosystem Services.” (2002): n.pag. Web. 2 Dec 2012. <http://www.ibcperu.org/doc/isis/8095.pdf>.
