Economic valuation of the eco-systemic benefits derived from the environmental asset lake Laguna Santa Elena, through the multi-criteria analysis

Abstract

Lake Laguna Santa Elena, a freshwater body, located in mid-south of Chile, is an environmental asset used as a water resource by the agricultural and touristic sector and is the habitat for a wide variety of endemic avifauna. The objective of this study was to assign a monetary value to this lacustrine body, using the methodology of AMUVAM (Multicriteria Analysis of Environmental Active Values). The information was collected through the application of surveys to a panel of experts involved in the use of the environmental resource. The result obtained with the AMUVAM method corresponds to the US $ 17,780,686, a figure that represents an estimated value of the TEV (Total Economic Value) of the environmental asset. This study, a pioneer in the Region, will support decision making, allowing an adequate management of this critical water resource.

Economic valuation of the ecosystem of the high Andean hydrographic basin tributary of the Chumbao River, through multicriteria analysis

“…In this way, the preferences detected in this study are similar to those we have found in the present research, where the collective group surveyed preferred the existence value that groups the regulatory ecosystem service. For the Santa Elena Lagoon in Chile, the valuation through the AMUVAM method allowed to know the monetary unit of US$ 17,780,686.00 at a social discount rate equal to 6%; where, the panel of experts consulted gave greater weight to the indirect use value (IUV) as the highest valuation component with 36.39% of score, followed by the stock value (EV) with 26.72% and the legacy value (BV) with 26.64%, leaving the direct use value (DUV) (market) at 4.07% and the option value (OV) at 6.17%, respectively (Romero et al, 2020); the percentage scores expressed and ultimately show a clear preference for equality between existence value and legacy, this means that the surveyed experts have an ecological profile with a clear orientation to preserve natural resources for future generations. But when equating the weights assigned with our study, in our case, the stock value reaches 53,63% and is the score given by cluster 2.0; which expresses that the collective groups prefer to conserve environmental assets and possibly would be willing to declare as a protected natural area in the upper part of the chumbao river valley.…”

“…The measures described above allow us to establish to what extent the decision in the peer comparison is consistent and not influenced by contradictions or biases (Romero et al, 2020).…”

“…By virtue of the above, the AHP methodology as a multi-criteria tool allows experts to give weight to the evaluation criteria or alternatives through a systematic comparison between peers of each of the options under evaluation (Romero et al, 2020). Therefore, the variables to be compared by the experts in this study were based on the methodology used by Aznar Bellver and Guijarro Martínez (2012) which consists of the interrelation of the components of the environmental asset in question with a TEV approach.…”

“…And, therefore, in environmental or ecological economics valuation methods were developed with different approaches, including: (i) the avoided or induced cost method; (ii) the method of travel costs; (iii) the hedonic price method (iv) contingent valuation method and others that do not merit extending it so they are less usual and inconsistent. The first three are considered the revealed preference method (indirect approach) and the last corresponds to the declared preference method (direct approach); the different values attributed to environmental goods and services and their estimation techniques may be exclusive, alternative or competitive; because valuing them a natural resource is a complicated process, little understood by most of society because it presents difficulty in its moderation, because not all environmental benefits and costs have a market price, given that the environment is not a private good, but a public good (Barrial-Lujan et al, 2022;Romero et al, 2020). For the present research, the analytical multicriteria valuation method (AMUVAM) has been chosen because it presents elementary advantages over the methods described above, so it includes the concept of total economic value, which involves direct and indirect uses related to environmental assets in question (Romero et al, 2020).…”

“…The first three are considered the revealed preference method (indirect approach) and the last corresponds to the declared preference method (direct approach); the different values attributed to environmental goods and services and their estimation techniques may be exclusive, alternative or competitive; because valuing them a natural resource is a complicated process, little understood by most of society because it presents difficulty in its moderation, because not all environmental benefits and costs have a market price, given that the environment is not a private good, but a public good (Barrial-Lujan et al, 2022;Romero et al, 2020). For the present research, the analytical multicriteria valuation method (AMUVAM) has been chosen because it presents elementary advantages over the methods described above, so it includes the concept of total economic value, which involves direct and indirect uses related to environmental assets in question (Romero et al, 2020). As well as reports Gomez (Gómez-Aguayo and Estruch-Guitart, 2019), The advantages of the multicriteria method stand out: i) ability to deal with qualitative and quantitative criteria (Leung and Cao, 2001;Swiercz and Ezzedeen, 2001); ii) accessibility in the implementation phases (Braglia et al, 2004); ii) Adaptability to any type of economic and territorial environment (Gómez-Aguayo and Estruch-Guitart, 2019); iv) consistency in results, because the data is provided by experts; v) possibility of covering one or more ecosystem services in the same study; and, vi) solve common problems in valuation such as the incommensurability of the environmental attributes of assets (Swiercz and Ezzedeen, 2001).…”