Indian and Howard Creek Watershed Protection Plan (NECBA)

Client: North Carolina Ecosystem Enhancement Program (EEP)

Location: Lincoln and Gaston Counties, North Carolina

Summary: Stakeholder participation is a crucial component of local watershed planning. The failure to incorporate meaningful stakeholder input can result in a stakeholder engagement process that is contentious and frustrating and often fails to achieve the necessary consensus. The Net Environmental and Community Impact Analysis (NECBA) approach provides a flexible platform for indentifying and discussing goals and metrics for evaluating alternative projects. It also helps reduce conflict and build consensus by helping stakeholders articulate their preferences and understand the preferences of others. These insights help stakeholders understand the trade-offs among alternative projects and explore different alternatives.

The NECBA developed by Cardno ENTRIX was built through a series of stakeholder engagement activities. These activities included an online survey, a stakeholder meeting, a webinar, and the creation of a spreadsheet model. Stakeholders were asked to identify major groups of benefits derived from a particular project along with metrics for assessing the extent to which projects provided benefits. In a series of exercises, stakeholders then made choices and trade-offs among hypothetical projects to help them determine how much weight should be given to each metric. A statistical model, widely used in environmental economics inferred these weights, in percentage terms, for each stakeholder assigned metric and group.

Once metrics and their respected weights were finalized, they were used to provide a technical score for over 150 projects, including stream restoration, potential stream preservation projects, wetlands restoration projects, urban stormwater best management practice (BMP) sites, and two agricultural BMP sites. The results are being incorporated into the final plan. Stakeholders hope to use the results of this rigorous scoring approach to justify the valuation of projects in seeking additional funding for projects.