Search

We estimate the ecosystem service value of water supplied by the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California under climate change projections through the 21st century. We couple water flow projections from a dynamic vegetation model with an economic demand model for residential water originating from the San Bernardino National Forest. Application of the method demonstrates how estimates of consumer welfare changes due to variation in water supply from public lands in Southern California can inform policy and land management decisions. Results suggest variations in welfare changes over time due to alterations in the projected water supply surpluses, shifting demand limited by water supply shortages or surpluses, and price increases. Results are sensitive to future climate projections—in some cases large decreases in welfare due to supply shortages—and to assumptions about the demand model.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) is increasingly being integrated into poverty reduction strategies in developing countries. However, debate remains over key elements of CCT program design. Using a discrete choice model, this paper examines Ghanaian households’ preferences regarding key CCT program design elements including conditionality, targeting, and payment method. The results revealed a preference for CCT designs that target beneficiaries with limited or no productive capacity and CCT designs that are conditional on beneficiaries either investing in children's human capital or performing communal service, relative to unconditional programs. Also, direct bank deposit was revealed as the preferred payment mode relative to receipt of cash payments or use of mobile money systems. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Protected areas are a major approach for conserving ecosystem services globally. Effective conservation in protected areas must integrate human livelihoods into the design and management of conservation. Although ecosystem services can contribute to reducing local people's costs of conservation, exploitation of ecosystem services often results in ecosystem degradation. One important ecosystem service is fuelwood, which is used by > 2.5 billion people worldwide. Conservation policy design needs information on the demand for and values of fuelwood that can be extracted without compromising conservation goals of protected areas. We estimated local people's willingness to pay (WTP) for access to fuelwood in China's Wolong Nature Reserve, which is undergoing a net increase in forest area. Forest recovery in Wolong resulted from both the protection of the reserve and conservation under China's Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). The estimated mean WTP for access to fuelwood accounted for about 21% of the payment under the NFCP. Among household characteristics, the cultural practice of cooking pig fodder, for which there were poor substitutes, played a major role in driving the demand for fuelwood. Although fuelwood collection can be prevented through increased conservation payments, fuelwood collection under forest management that fulfills conservation goals of the reserve can substantially reduce the costs of conservation. In addition, many other ecosystem services are also important to local people's livelihoods, and the combined values of different ecosystem services can substantially lower the costs of effective conservation in Wolong and many other protected areas around the world.

In a world free of transaction costs, reverse auctions can cost-effectively allocate payment for environmental service contracts by targeting projects that provide the most benefit per dollar spent. However, auctions only succeed if enough farmers choose to bid so that the auctioneer can evaluate numerous projects for targeted funding. A 2014 conservation auction to allocate payments for phosphorus reduction practices in NW Ohio experienced very thin bidding. According to a follow-up survey, auction participation was deterred by the complexity of the bidding process and the need to negotiate with renters. Due to low participation, the actual conservation auction made payments for phosphorus reduction that were surprisingly costly at the margin. Applying a farmer behavioral model to the Western Lake Erie Basin, we simulate participation choice and cost-effectiveness of environmental outcomes in reverse auctions and uniform payment conservation programs. Results reveal that when perceived transaction costs of bid preparation are high, reverse auctions are less cost-effective than spatially targeted, uniform payment programs that attract higher participation. Keywords: reverse auctions, transaction costs, cost-effective, conservation programs, endogenous participation

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Benefit transfer is a valuation method in which values calculated for a resource in a primary study are used to estimate values for a similar resource at a different policy site. It is especially useful when answering urgent policy questions in situations in which constraints on time and/or money preclude the ability to collect primary data for the site in question because it allows researchers to respond quickly to a need for estimates of the value of the resource (Freeman, Herriges, and Kling 2014). One such site is the Western Lake Erie Basin, where beaches have had to be closed periodically in recent years because of harmful algal blooms (HABs) spurred primarily by phosphorus from agricultural run-off. The algae (Microcystis sp.) produce a toxin that is dangerous for humans, pets, and wildlife, and policymakers and stakeholders urgently need information regarding the causes and impacts of the blooms (International Joint Commission (IJC) 2014).We apply two benefit-transfer methods-value transfer and function transfer-to estimate the value of Lake Erie's beaches and then analyze the relative merits of those methods when the availability of behavioral and economic data in the policy setting and the scale of the environmental damage being assessed (the number of beach sites closed) vary. When selecting a benefit-transfer method, researchers face a tradeoff between the simplicity of a value transfer and the ability of a function transfer to represent the unique characteristics of the policy site and the affected population more accurately. Our study contributes to an understanding of the relative advantages and disadvantages of each method for various policy environments.The simplest method is value transfer, which involves assigning a single point estimate of value from a study site to a policy site. Value transfer is quick and straightforward but does not account for differences between the sites and assumes that the conditions of the study site are representative of the conditions of the policy site. So, for example, value transfer does not capture how choice sets differ. In the case of Lake Erie beaches, accounting for the availability of alternative beach sites is important-fewer sites in the choice set limit the substitute beaches available when some beaches are closed and can lead to substantial welfare losses.Benefit function transfer is a more complex approach in which a value function estimated in one or more primary studies is used to value a resource at a different policy site (Boyle et al. 2010). Broadly speaking, function transfers are preferable to value transfers because they are more flexible and can account for heterogeneous population characteristics and amenity attributes (Kaul et al. 2013, Boyle et al. 2010, Johnston and Rosenberger 2010, Brouwer and Spaninks 1999). However, function transfers are more time-consuming and require additional data about the policy site to calibrate the value function.When conducting a benefit-transfer study, researchers must decide if the function transfer is worth the additional time and effort required. To evaluate the merit of the more complicated transfer method, we compare estimates of welfare losses from the closing of Lake Erie beaches using a value transfer and a function transfer. We estimate losses for single closures for each public Lake Erie beach site along the Michigan and Ohio coasts and for simultaneous regional closures of groups of beaches. Parsons et al. (2009) showed that group closures cause greater per-trip welfare losses than individual closures. In Lake Erie, bacterial contamination typically leads to one or a small number of beaches being closed while HABs typically affect much larger areas. We determine how the transfer method and number of beaches closed affect the value estimates in hypothetical closure scenarios.We find that function transfer is preferred over value transfer to estimate trip demand when reliable data about trips are not available and to estimate welfare losses from regional closures. …

As conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs spread in African countries, there is a need for well-designed programs that reflect their economic, institutional, political, and sociocultural circumstances. Using both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, this article examines the perspectives of beneficiaries, program managers, and community leaders regarding Ghana’s CCT program. It addresses sociocultural attitudes toward poverty, perceptions of CCT as a poverty reduction strategy, and experiences with CCT implementation. Findings indicate favorable views of CCT but little support for giving money to the poor as a long-term poverty-alleviation strategy. Ghana’s CCT program is seen as fair and popular, but current payment levels are viewed as inadequate, impractical, and unreliable.

Non point source (NPS) pollution remains a challenge to communities meeting watershed management objectives around the world. Installing agricultural best management practices (BMPs) such as filter strips is a widely accepted mechanism to control NPS pollution and agricultural runoff. Government programs in the form of payment for environmental services (PES) have been introduced to encourage BMP adoption for watershed protection. However, the voluntary nature of these programs makes landowners’ decision to participate in them critical to achieving program goals. Understanding the drivers behind landowners’ decisions to participate in watershed protection programs is essential for designing effective and efficient programs. This study examines agricultural landowners’ decisions to participate in a conservation program involving filter strips. Using responses from a survey of agricultural landowners in Michigan's Saginaw Bay watershed, the study examines key programmatic, socio-psychological, and demographic determinants of landowners’ participation decisions. The study results suggest that making contract durations shorter with enhanced rental payments, and educating landowners about program efficacy as well as on- and off-farm benefits of the conservation practice would enhance participation.

As global efforts to protect ecosystems expand, there is increasing concern about conservation costs borne by rural communities. To date, these costs have often been narrowly estimated in terms of foregone livelihood opportunities directly caused by conservation, while unintended human burdens that accrue with ecological gains from conservation are often ignored. As a first attempt to quantify this previously hidden cost, we estimated the impact of converting cropland to forest under one of the world’s largest conservation policies, China’s Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP), on crop raiding in a demonstration site using the matching approach. We found that GTGP afforestation was responsible for 64 % of the crop damage by wildlife on remaining cropland, a cost worth 27 % of GTGP’s total payment to farmers. Our study highlights that the conservation cost to communities through influencing human-wildlife conflicts can be substantial, which should be quantified and considered in global conservation efforts to avoid unintended burdens on rural communities.

Around the globe, previously isolated rural areas are increasingly connected with other distant places (e.g., cities) by telecouplings (i.e., environmental and socioeconomic interactions over distances) such as payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs, labor migration, and tourism. Although many studies have estimated impacts of telecouplings in rural areas, little is known about how these impacts might in turn affect telecouplings themselves through feedbacks. Using household survey data collected in China's Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), we evaluated an unexpected impact of the telecoupling of the Grain to Green Program (GTGP) - one of the largest PES programs in the world. This impact may trigger a feedback that can strengthen the GTGP in the future. A previous study in Wolong found that afforestation on marginal cropland promoted by the GTGP has significantly intensified crop damage by wildlife on nearby remaining cropland. We evaluated how this change might in turn affect the GTGP by estimating the impact of crop damage induced by the current GTGP on local households' willingness to participate in possible future GTGP. Our results show that due to the impact of the current GTGP on crop damage, local households may enroll 10.4% more cropland that is close to the afforested lands in future GTGP, which suggests a positive feedback that will strengthen the influences of the GTGP in Wolong and beyond. Our study highlights that local human-nature interactions driven by telecouplings, such as human-wildlife conflicts, may trigger feedbacks that affect telecouplings themselves. With improved understanding of telecouplings' feedbacks, scientists, policy-makers, and conservation practitioners can better anticipate the complex interactions among different places and design effective conservation strategies for achieving sustainability objectives such as those set by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Institutions' reputation for being environmentally friendly or ‘green’ can come from many sources. This paper examines how the attributes of alternative energy management plans impact an institutions' ‘green’ reputation by focusing on the interaction between ‘external’ and ’internal’ influences. Some ‘external’ influences on environmental reputation we studied include the institution's mix of fuels, energy conservation effort, carbon emissions targets, investment time-frame, and program cost. The ‘internal’ influences on institutions' green reputation we examined include altruism (respondents' concern for the welfare of others) and environmentalism (respondents' concern for the environment). Using a stated-preference conjoint survey, we empirically examine how attributes of alternative energy management plans influence a large, research university's ‘green’ reputation. Our results show that constituents benefit from their institution's green reputation and that the energy management choices of the institution can significantly influence its perceived green reputation. Furthermore, integrating internal and external influences on reputation can create more informative models and better decision-making.

Understanding farmers’ willingness to participate in agricultural payment-for-environmental-services (PES) programmes is an essential precondition for designing effective and efficient programmes. Willingness to participate is typically examined via stated preference surveys using the standard hurdle model for whether and how much to participate. Among respondents who decline to participate, such analyses cannot distinguish between respondents who declined due to the payment level and those who were not interested at all. This paper applies a double hurdle model to incorporate a prior condition for whether a respondent is even willing to consider participating in the PES market. The model uses a unique stated preference survey permitting separation of the consideration and enrolment decisions of 1,700 farmers in Michigan, USA. The first hurdle probit model suggests that farmers’ willingness to consider PES chiefly depends on farm and farmer characteristics, while the second hurdle tobit model shows that decisions on whether and how much to enrol depend more on the payment offer and marginal benefit–cost criteria. This study provides fresh insights on facilitating farmer participation in PES programmes using tiered strategies that differ in costs of programme payment and administration.

a b s t r a c t Conservation investments are increasingly being implemented through payments for ecosystem ser- vices (PES) for the protection and restoration of ecosystem services around the world. Previous studies suggested that social norms have substantial impacts on environmental behaviors of humans, including enrollment of PES programs. However, it is still not well understood how social norms are affected by the design of PES programs and how the evolution of social norms may affect the efficiency of conservation investments. In this paper, we developed an agent-based simulation model to demonstrate the evolu- tion and impacts of social norms on the enrollment of agricultural land in a PES program. We applied the model to land plots that have been enrolled in China's Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP) to examine reenrollment in an alternative payment program when the current payments ceased. The study was conducted in Wolong Nature Reserve where several thousand plant and animal species, including giant pandas, may benefit from the reenrollment. We found that over 15% more GTGP land can be reenrolled at the same payment if social norms were leveraged by allowing more than 10 rounds of interactions among landholders regarding their reenrollment decisions. With only three rounds of interactions, an additional 7.5% GTGP land was reenrolled at the same payment due to the effects of social norms. In addition, the effects of social norms were largest at intermediate payments and were smaller at much higher or much smaller payments. Even in circumstances where frequent interactions among landhold- ers about their enrollment decisions are not feasible, policy arrangements that divide households into multiple waves for sequential enrollment can enroll over 11% more land at a given payment level. The approach presented in this paper can be used to improve the efficiency of existing PES programs and many other conservation investments worldwide.

Many governments, firms, institutions and individuals have become increasingly cognizant of their impact on the environment, most notably with respect to global climate change. Coupled with the possibility of future regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, firms and institutions have begun to critically evaluate their own carbon footprint. This paper examines the preferences of stakeholders within a large academic institution for attributes of alternative greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategies. The attributes considered by constituents include: the fuel portfolio mix, effort for conserving energy use, carbon emissions reduction, timeframe for emissions reduction to be achieved and cost. We use a choice experiment technique that enables the examination of greenhouse gas reduction program attribute preferences across three constituent groups. The results show that each of the constituent groups have a positive WTP for carbon emissions reductions and prefer investments in reductions in the shorter- rather than longer-term. The results also suggest differences between the constituent groups in their WTP for types of fuels in the fuel portfolio. Finally, we use the results to examine the welfare implications of different combinations of the policy attributes that coincide with alternative GHG program strategies.

Ecosystem services are being protected and restored worldwide through payments for ecosystem services in which participants are paid to alter their land-management approaches to benefit the environment. The efficiency of such investments depends on the design of the payment scheme. Land features have been used to measure the environmental benefits of and amount of payment for land enrollment in payment for ecosystem services schemes. Household characteristics of program participants, however, may also be important in the targeting of land for enrollment. We used the characteristics of households participating in China's Grain-to-Green program, and features of enrolled land to examine the targeting of land enrollment in that program in Wolong Nature Reserve. We compared levels of environmental benefits that can be obtained through cost-effective targeting of land enrollment for different types of benefits under different payment schemes. The efficiency of investments in a discriminative payment scheme (payments differ according to opportunity costs, i.e., landholders' costs of forgoing alternative uses of land) was substantially higher than in a flat payment scheme (same price paid to all participants). Both optimal targeting and suboptimal targeting of land enrollment for environmental benefits achieved substantially more environmental benefits than random selection of land for enrollment. Our results suggest that cost-effective targeting of land through the use of discriminative conservation payments can substantially improve the efficiency of investments in the Grain-to-Green program and other payment for ecosystem services programs.

Humans have altered much of the natural land cover, resulting in ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss worldwide. Many countries have implemented conservation payment programs for agricultural land conversion to counter this trend. However, the sustainability of ecosystem services from these programs is unknown due to uncertainty about land uses when payments cease. We studied post-program land use plans for China’s Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP), one of the world’s largest ecosystem service payment programs, in Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pandas. Although farmers in the reserve planned to reconvert only 22.6% of the land that was enrolled in the GTGP to agriculture after payments cease, these GTGP plots are distributed across the landscape and may be important for many ecosystem services. Along with regional differences, the amount of GTGP land households planned to reconvert was significantly reduced by the respondent’s age and off-farm household income and was significantly increased by the number of household laborers and total amount of land the household had enrolled in the GTGP. Thus, regional, demographic and economic factors should be considered to more efficiently sustain conservation benefits from payment for ecosystem service programs.

An increasing amount of investment has been devoted to protecting and restoring ecosystem services worldwide. The efficiency of conservation investments, including payments for ecosystem services (PES), has been found to be affected by biological, political, economic, demographic, and social factors, but little is known about the effects of social norms at the neighborhood level. As a first attempt to quantify the effects of social norms, we studied the effects of a series of possible factors on people's intentions of maintaining forest on their Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP) land plots if the program ends. GTGP is one of the world's largest PES programs and plays an important role in global conservation efforts. Our study was conducted in China's Wolong Nature Reserve, home to the world-famous endangered giant pandas and >4,500 farmers. We found that, in addition to conservation payment amounts and program duration, social norms at the neighborhood level had significant impacts on program re-enrollment, suggesting that social norms can be used to leverage participation to enhance the sustainability of conservation benefits from PES programs. Moreover, our results demonstrate that economic and demographic trends also have profound implications for sustainable conservation. Thus, social norms should be incorporated with economic and demographic trends for efficient conservation investments.

The long-term success of payment for environmental services (PES) schemes depends on adequate demand for services and sustainable financing. We examine the viability of using locally financed payments to protect watershed services in rural eastern Costa Rica. Using dichotomous choice contingent valuation, we measure households' willingness to pay higher water bills for a local PES programme to adjust upstream land use practices to protect downstream water quality. We found that every income segment of the local population of water-users exhibited significant demand and willingness to finance the PES programme to protect local water quality.

Forests generate market (e.g., timber) and nonmarket (e.g., wildlife) values to individuals, and multiple-use forest management involves making trade-offs between different management goals. This research uses results from six focus-groups to understand how the public perceives these trade-offs and examines differences between urban and rural groups in Michigan's Central Upper Peninsula. Results reveal differences between rural, timber-dependent and urban, non-timber-dependent participants' familiarity with forest management and ecological interactions within forests. Results support the idea that rural, timber-dependent community members are very concerned about the continued provision of both market and nonmarket forest outputs. Urban, non-timber-dependent community residents have milder concerns for sustaining multiple forest outputs but expressed strong concerns for maintaining recreational opportunities for personal uses. The results do not support the hypothesis that rural/urban views lie as expecte...

Despite its status as a nature reserve, Wolong Nature Reserve (China) has experienced continued loss of giant panda habitat due to human activities such as fuelwood collection. Electricity, though available throughout Wolong, has not replaced fuelwood as an energy source. We used stated preference data obtained from in-person interviews to estimate a random utility model of the choice of adopting electricity for cooking and heating. Willingness to switch to electricity was explained by demographic and electricity factors (price, voltage, and outage frequency). In addition to price, nonprice factors such as voltage and outage frequency significantly affect the demand. Thus, lowering electricity prices and increasing electricity quality would encourage local residents to switch from fuelwood to electricity and should be considered in the mix of policies to promote conservation of panda habitat. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

We use a nested-logit model of recreational fishing to examine how varying the range of fishing activities included in the choice set affects welfare measures. The basic analytical results are quite intuitive: welfare calculations with a site-choice travel cost model that omits relevant substitute activities will tend to understate gains and to overstate losses for a fixed sample and a fixed set of model parameters. The magnitude of bias in any particular case will be directly related to the degree of substitution between the omitted activities and the activities included in the model. In our empirical application, we examine changes in the quality of trout and salmon fishing on the Great Lakes and on anadromous runs. For most of the scenarios examined, we find that models that only include Great Lakes and anadromous fishing activities, to the exclusion of inland fishing activities, yield welfare results that are relatively similar to those of models that include the full range of activities, provided car...

A stated preference approach is used to predict likely responses to market reform in Zimbabwe. A random utility model is estimated using data on consumers' stated preferences for alternative types of maize meal. The model is used to predict demand patterns resulting from market reforms. Predicted demand is then compared with actual demand following market reforms. An analysis of the welfare effects of alternative policy scenarios shows that coupling the removal of consumer maize subsidies with improved access to a broader range of maize meal products ameliorated many of the adverse effects of subsidy removal, especially for lower-income groups. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

Drop-off recycling is one of the most widely adopted recycling programs in the United States. Despite its wide implementation, relatively little literature addresses the demand for drop-off recycling. This study examines the demand for drop-off recycling sites as a function of travel costs and various site characteristics using the random utility model (RUM). The findings of this study indicate that increased travel costs significantly reduce the frequency of visits to drop-off sites implying that the usage pattern of a site is influenced by its location relative to where people live. This study also demonstrates that site specific characteristics such as hours of operation, the number of recyclables accepted, acceptance of commingled recyclables, and acceptance of yard-waste affect the frequency of visits to drop-off sites.