Developing Human Wellbeing Indicators in the Puget Sound: Focusing on the Watershed Scale

Planning for and monitoring human wellbeing (HWB) as a component of ecosystem recovery is a growing trend in environmental management. Within the Puget Sound specifically, organizations at the watershed and basin scale have been developing recovery action plans with placeholders for HWB or quality of life indicators. While the actual incorporation of HWB into policy has been limited, there is significant interest to receive guidance for developing indicators and begin addressing HWB in practice. This article describes the results of a pilot process to develop scientifically and practically relevant HWB indicators for the Hood Canal watershed of the Puget Sound. We gathered data on why residents and visitors value the Hood Canal from prior surveys, workshops, and nineteen open-ended interviews with diverse residents from the region. We coded these values into potential indicators of HWB for six domains: Psychological, Cultural, Social, Physical, Economic, and Governance. Three facilitated workshops with expert-stakeholders and an online survey with social scientists helped refine and rate indicators for recommendation to the regional watershed recovery coordinating council. We present the final indicators, detail the methods for getting to them, and discuss how they will be applied to enhance watershed recovery in the Hood Canal watershed. We then describe how this process can be replicated elsewhere and how it will be used to test hypotheses about scalability of HWB indicators in the Puget Sound.