Quantifying the Costs and Benefits of Coastal Water Quality Improvements in the Ko Chang Marine National Park, Thailand

Abstract

The water quality in Ko Chang Marine National Park coast has been problematic for many years. Recently, a conservation plan has been made by the local government for protecting the ocean beaches by constructing a sewage treatment plant in the region. This study uses the contingent valuation method (CVM) to measure the benefits associated with the proposal of the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), followed by conducting cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in order to justify the feasibility of the public fund appropriation by the government fiscal policy, such as taxes. A completed questionnaire survey of 300 randomly clustered households was analyzed. Household willingness to pay (WTP) was estimated using Tobit models. The results indicate that the mean WTP for the proposed wastewater treatment project is $73.36 per household per year, translating into an aggregate monetary benefit of $298,774 per year for the local community. Additionally, the CBA result shows that the net present value (NPV) of the project attains $465,162.48 per year, internal rate of return (IRR) reaches 9.14 %, and benefit-cost ratio (B/C) ends up with 2.21 with all those intangible benefits excluded from the calculation. Therefore, the proposed wastewater treatment plant project is economically profitable.

Residents' acceptability and response to the water-pricing policy to reduce marine pollution caused by domestic sewage

“…The improvement of sewage treatment plant technology can not only reduce the environmental pollution, but also reduce the threat to the health of coastal residents and bring a series of social and economic benefits (Birol and Das, 2010). Higher education experience may raise people's concern about environmental protection, which is in accord with previous findings (Piriyapada and Wang, 2014;Cicatiello et al, 2020;Jin and Li, 2020). Additionally, the coefficient of family size is significant at the 1% level, which indicates a negative correlation between family size and WTP.…”

Willingness to Pay for Recreational Benefit Evaluation in a Wastewater Reuse Project. Analysis of a Case Study

“…As remarked by Tziakis et al [10], the construction/upgrade of a wastewater treatment plant must be "approved of" by the residents, who should also be willing to pay for its construction and operation.In this context, in order to evaluate the economic feasibility of the projects, the contingent valuation method (CVM) can be effectively used to enhance the non-market benefits associated with this type of project, for example for recreational and landscape benefits, in order to estimate the total economic value of the investments. It allows the value of non-market goods and services to be determined and is the most widely-used method in evaluating environmental assets by surveying people's willingness to pay for such an asset and/or what they would be willing to receive by way of compensation in order to tolerate such a cost; i.e., preservation of a natural park, or the upgrade of a wastewater treatment plant [11].Numerous studies have been published dealing with the application of CVM in different parts of the world in the case of reclaimed water reuse projects [10,[12][13][14][15][16], sustainable drainage systems and flood risk reduction [17,18], improvement in the surface water quality for nutrient reduction [19], improvement of the water quality used for irrigation needs [20], for coastal water depollution [21], and finally, for tap water quality improvement [22]. Details of these studies are reported in Table 1, together with their aims and main results.…”

“…Numerous studies have been published dealing with the application of CVM in different parts of the world in the case of reclaimed water reuse projects [10,[12][13][14][15][16], sustainable drainage systems and flood risk reduction [17,18], improvement in the surface water quality for nutrient reduction [19], improvement of the water quality used for irrigation needs [20], for coastal water depollution [21], and finally, for tap water quality improvement [22]. Details of these studies are reported in Table 1, together with their aims and main results.…”

Public Perceptions of the Ocean: Lessons for Marine Conservation From a Global Research Review

“…All other countries had 15 or fewer studies, with 57 countries having fewer than five studies (Figure 2; Supplementary Table 4). In terms of scale, the majority of studies (84%) assessed public perceptions at a subnational scale (e.g., Piriyapada and Wang, 2014), with 12% at the national scale (e.g., Goldberg et al, 2016), and only 5% assessed perceptions in more than one country. The largest study assessed ocean perceptions in ten countries (Gelcich et al, 2014).…”