Public Attitudes, Preferences and Willingness to Pay for River Ecosystem Services

Abstract

River basins are key sources of ecosystem services, with a wide range of social and economic benefits and many effects on human well-being. However, intensified land use and other dramatic variations in river ecosystems can alter ecosystem functions and services. In this study, we explored the public awareness, attitude and perception regarding environmental and water resource issues and assessed the willingness to pay (WTP) for improving selected attributes of the Wei River basin. Various rankings, Likert scales and random parameter logit (RPL) models were used to analyze data obtained from 900 surveyed respondents. Most respondents were more concerned about environmental and water resource management issues rather than socioeconomic attributes. From a policy perspective, 83.32% and 50.50% of the residents ranked “improvement in water quality” and “improving irrigation conditions,” respectively, as their main priorities regarding ecological restoration. Moreover, the results obtained using RPL models showed that the coefficients were significant for all ecological attributes and monetary attributes, as expected. The positive and significant coefficient for the alternative specific constant demonstrated that the respondents preferred restoration alternatives to the status quo. Furthermore, the highest WTP was found for water quality (91.99 RMB), followed by erosion intensity (23.59 RMB) and water quantity (11.79 RMB). Our results are relevant to policy development and they indicate that ecological restoration is the favored option.

Using stakeholders' preference for ecosystems and ecosystem services as an economic basis underlying strategic conservation planning

“…This could imply that only when respondents are satisfied with water quality will they be more likely to prioritize other ES. This follows the results of previous studies showing that residents prioritize the improvement of water quality ( Brox et al., 1996 ; Calderon et al., 2012 ; Doherty et al., 2014 ; Castro et al., 2016 ; Aguilar et al., 2018 ; Khan et al., 2019 ; Khan and Zhao, 2019 ).…”

“…Other research endeavors focus on evaluating residents' Willingness to Pay (WTP) to support water quality improvement ( Calderon et al., 2012 ; Doherty et al., 2014 ; Ureta et al., 2016 ; Khan and Zhao, 2019 ). A consensus across these studies is that residents have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for good water quality ( Doherty et al., 2014 ; Khan et al., 2019 ) and prefer water quality improvements more than water distribution ( Khan and Zhao, 2019 ). However, divergence exists.…”

“…Despite the importance of the state's ecosystem services, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study that has evaluated the residents' preference for conserving these services. Following the previous studies that linked the residents' preference to prioritizing water quality improvement as an ecosystem service ( Brox et al., 1996 ; Doherty et al., 2014 ; Castro et al., 2016 ; Aguilar et al., 2018 ; Khan et al., 2019 ; Khan and Zhao, 2019 ), we hypothesized that South Carolina residents would prefer improved water quality over the other ecosystem services examined.…”

Assessing restoration benefit of grassland ecosystem incorporating preference heterogeneity empirical data from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

“…The characteristics of respondents' environmental attitudes include their awareness of grassland ecosystem and their emphasis on the improvement of grassland ecological environment. Respondents’ attitude, awareness and site attachments are very important to determine their environmental protection decision ( Khan et al, 2019a , Khan et al, 2019b ).…”

“…For the standard deviation of random parameters, the herdsmen's preference for vegetation coverage, groundwater level, rare wildlife and grassland landscape are significant at the 1% level, which means that herdsmen's preferences for these attributes have significant heterogeneity and random characteristics. It also reflects the advantages of mixed logit model, which can relax the “independence of irrelevant alternatives” (IIA) assumption, reveal and account for heterogeneity of individual preferences in the restoration of grassland ecosystem ( Hensher and Greene, 2003 , Khan et al, 2019b , Shi et al, 2016a , Shi et al, 2016b ).…”