Abstract
Eco-environmental protection of river basins and compensation for damages have been important issues for researchers around the world for a long time. Many studies have focused on the correlations among individual socioeconomic characteristics, ecological cognition, and differences in the willingness to pay. However, no research has been conducted from the perspective of perceived environmental quality. According to the Broken Windows Theory, the public’s willingness and behaviors regarding environmental protection are determined largely by earlier perceptions of environmental quality. Therefore, we used a spatial choice experiment to investigate the willingness of the public to pay for ecosystem restoration in the upper, middle, and lower reaches of the Xijiang River Basin in China. This paper discusses if perceived environmental quality is a factor that creates different levels in the willingness to pay. Our results show that the Broken Window Effect can better explain these differences. Living in a better ecological environment, the upper-reaches public expect to pay for the restoration of the river basin’s ecosystem to a higher state and is willing to be the “first person” to repair the “broken windows,” whereas those in the middle and lower reaches are willing to pay only for a restoration to a good state.
Highlights
Watershed ecosystem is a huge complex ecosystem composed of social-economic-natural ecosystem, which is crucial for regional ecological security, sustainable development and human well-being, and their positive and negative externalities are transferred along the basin in time and space (Carvalho et al, 2019; Yee et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2020; Berger et al, 2021)
The protection and restoration of the river basin ecosystem depend on the path of “starting with people.”
Combining the main ideas of the Broken Window Effect, which originated in criminal psychology, we verified our main hypothesis with the results of a logit modeling of random parameters
Summary
Watershed ecosystem is a huge complex ecosystem composed of social-economic-natural ecosystem, which is crucial for regional ecological security, sustainable development and human well-being, and their positive and negative externalities are transferred along the basin in time and space (Carvalho et al, 2019; Yee et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2020; Berger et al, 2021). As the direct beneficiary of ecological protection and the ultimate executor and implementor of ecological restoration policies, the public’s WTP and behaviors regarding environmental protection carry the important function of “cutting off the irrational interference and intervention of human factors in the environment” (Zhao, 2016; Odonkor and Adom, 2020; Wei et al, 2020). An accurate analysis of the factors affecting the public’s willingness to participate in environmental protection is more conducive to the orderly restoration of watershed ecosystems. As residents pay more and more attention to the positive and negative impacts of the watershed environment, individuals’ first impression of local environmental quality tends to influence their behavior more than early intervention measures, so as to effectively study residents’ willingness to participate in the watershed ecosystem protection and explore changes in watershed ecosystem service functions and their driving factors. It has enlightenment significance to promote the protection and high-quality development of the watershed ecosystem
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