Perceived health risks, averting behavior, and the value of improved groundwater quality

This project seeks to assess how households with private wells in Wisconsin respond to growing threats of groundwater contamination, focusing on the economic value they place on reducing health risks from pollutants such as nitrates, PFAS, bacteria, and volatile organic compounds. With roughly one-third of Wisconsin’s rural population relying on private wells, the contamination of these water sources poses significant health risks, including cancer and gastrointestinal illnesses. Many households take costly preventive measures, known as “averting behaviors,” such as installing filtration systems, purchasing bottled water, and rehabilitating wells. These actions provide insight into how much households are willing to pay for safer drinking water.

The project has three key objectives: First, it will examine how perceived health risks influence decisions to adopt specific averting behaviors, and how these perceptions affect expenditures on preventive actions. Second, it will estimate the economic value households assign to reducing health risks by calculating the value of a statistical life (VSL) and the value of a statistical illness (VSI), which represent the monetary value attributed to preventing fatalities and illnesses caused by groundwater contamination. Finally, the project will investigate how factors like nearby land use, well characteristics, and household socioeconomic attributes shape households’ perceptions of health risks.

By focusing on private well users and applying rigorous methods to elicit risk perceptions while addressing potential biases and inconsistencies, this project fills a significant gap in existing research, which has predominantly focused on public water systems. The findings will provide policymakers, public health professionals, and groundwater management agencies with critical data, informing cost-benefit analyses and guiding decisions aimed at securing safer drinking water for rural communities across Wisconsin and beyond.