The Effect of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Human Wellbeing in the Gulf of Mexico

It’s always important in environmental assessment to be able to understand how an event has an effect on people. The only way to do that is to translate biophysical impacts to ecosystem service impacts. This approach was taken in order to determine how the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout impacted ecosystem services in the Gulf of Mexico. An Ecopath with Ecosim model was developed for the Northern Gulf of Mexico that incorporated three ecosystem services: commercial fisheries, recreational fisheries, and carbon sequestration. The model predicted an overall decrease in all three services investigated. Changes in commercial fisheries and carbon sequestration were valued by linking the model outputs to monetary valuation models. With regards to commercial fisheries the change in fisheries yield resulted in monetary changes ranging from $65 to -$5,091,109 in one year. Investigation of carbon sequestration predicted up to an $876,583 loss in the ability of the Northern Gulf of Mexico offshore environment to sequester carbon. This project has provided the first estimates of ecosystem services in an offshore environment and evaluated their changes as a result of DWH accident.