At a Conservation Crossroad: The Bahoruco-Jaragua-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve in the Dominican Republic

Víctor Gómez-Valenzuela,Francisco Alpízar,Harro Van Lente,Katerin Ramirez,Solhanlle Bonilla-Duarte

doi:10.3390/su131911030

Víctor Gómez-Valenzuela, Francisco Alpízar + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su131911030

Copy DOI

Abstract

This paper assesses the Dominican Republic’s willingness to pay (WTP) for a conservation, restoration, and sustainable development program for the Bahoruco-Jaragua-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve (RBJBE). Created in 2002, the RBJBE covers approximately 4858 km2, of which approximately 900 km2 correspond to the sea surface. With three core conservation zones, the RBJBE constitutes a complex space with a history of conflicts rooted in exploiting natural resources and social and economic issues. At the same time, it is a biodiversity hotspot of global importance. We present a Contingent Valuation Method to estimate the WTP for a conservation and restoration program called PROBIOSFERA. The non-parametric and parametric estimates of the WTP are DOP 165.00 (≈USD 2.94) and DOP 181.88 (≈USD 3.25), respectively. The socioeconomic variables that positively affect the WTP are income level, educational level, and age. The ecosystem services that are statistically related to WTP are the provisioning and supporting services. Regardless of the monetary valuation scenarios defined, the estimated annual monetized aggregated welfare associated with the RBJBE for Dominican society is DOP 7.2 billion (≈USD 128.1 million).

Highlights

We accomplished this goal by determining the economic tradeoff in reaction to hypothetical changes in the quality, quantity, or prices of public environmental goods represented by the Biosphere reserves (BRs) [36]
These three scenarios represent different perspectives and possible scales to shed some light on the monetary valuation of the RBJBE as a complex construct by the Dominican society [40,76], which facilitates a better understanding of the role of the reserve as an instrument of conservation and sustainable development based on the analytical scale from which this role is considered [2,39]
The three monetary valuation scenarios precisely estimate the annualized monetization of welfare that Dominican society wishes to implement with PROBIOSFERA