Valuing the benefits of forest restoration on enhancing hydropower and water supply in California's Sierra Nevada.

Forest restoration through mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and other management actions is vital to improving forest resilience to fire and drought across the Western United States, and yields benefits that can be monetized, including improvements in water supply and hydropower. Using California's Sierra Nevada as a study area, we assess the water and energy benefits of forest-restoration projects. By using a scalable top-down approach to track annual evapotranspiration following forest disturbance, coupled with hydropower simulations that include energy-price information, and marginal prices for water sales, we project the potential economic benefits of hydropower and water sales accruing to water-rights holders. The results found that water-related benefits from strategically planned fuels-reduction treatments now being carried out can be sufficient to offset costs of management actions aimed at forest restoration, especially in the face of climate change. Our findings justified investments in restoring forests and reinforce the central role of water and hydropower providers in partnerships for management of source-water watersheds. Results also highlighted the importance of accurate, scalable data and tools from the hydrology and water-resources community.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Science of the Total Environment

• Publication date

  2023-03-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162836PMID 36924953
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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