Assessing the economic value of an iconic urban heritage tree

Abstract

This study adopted the contingent valuation method (CVM) to estimate the annual economic value of Qiedong-Wang-Gong (Bischofia javanica), the only urban heritage tree that was over a thousand years old in Taiwan, having the largest population in Central Taiwan. In this study, 307 samples were collected and classifying and excluding the protest responses, which took up about 26.7% of the whole sample, resulted in a 36.4% increase in the mean overall WTP. Results indicated that the respondents who ascribed low importance to the existence values of urban heritage trees and those who had never heard of Qiedong-Wang-Gong (or showed little concern about regular payment for protecting urban heritage trees) were more likely not to pay for conserving Qiedong-Wang-Gong. The results also showed that the respondents whose ages ranged from 31 to 50 were likely to pay more than others for Qiedong-Wang-Gong conservation. Using multinomial logistic regression for further analysis, we found that older respondents were more familiar with Qiedong-Wang-Gong than younger ones. To bring more economic benefits of urban heritage trees management, our results suggested that local policymakers should improve young citizens' familiarities with local old trees by linking these green resources with the local culture.