Environmental attitudes and place identity as determinants of preferences for ecosystem services

Michela Faccioli,Mikołaj Czajkowski,Klaus Glenk,Julia Martin-Ortega

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106600

Abstract

Stated preference methods are frequently employed to measure people's willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem services. However, these techniques are also criticized for following a simplified approach, which often ignores the role of complex psychological and sociological factors, such as general environmental attitudes and place identity beliefs. By means of a discrete choice experiment exercise, we explored the influence of general environmental attitudes and place identity perceptions on WTP, taking peatland restoration in Scotland as a case study. Our research adds to the existing literature by providing a more nuanced picture of the determinants of WTP and by exploring and mapping the distribution of the estimated welfare measures. Our results, obtained from the estimation of hybrid choice models, show that people with more positive environmental attitudes and greater attachment to peatlands and Scotland tend to display higher WTP for peatland restoration. However, differences exist across respondents, depending on their socio-demographic profile and the geographical area. A better understanding of the heterogeneity of preferences for ecosystem services is helpful to guide more efficient policy design and to inform policy-makers about the distributional impacts of planned policies for equity considerations in project appraisal.

Highlights

Growing awareness that nature contributes to human wellbeing by supplying ecosystem goods and services that people enjoy, has contributed, over the last decades, to increase societal demand for conservation measures to halt the unprecedented rates of environmental degradation that we are witnessing
The present study aims to address the limitations of earlier research, by simultaneously exploring the role of general environmental attitudes and place identity beliefs on willingness to pay (WTP), while relying on the hybrid choice model as an improved econometric framework
While we find that both LV1 and LV2 exert a non-negligible and statistically significant effect on WTP, general environmental attitudes play a bigger role than place identity perceptions

Summary

Introduction

Growing awareness that nature contributes to human wellbeing by supplying ecosystem goods and services that people enjoy, has contributed, over the last decades, to increase societal demand for conservation measures to halt the unprecedented rates of environmental degradation that we are witnessing. The call for extra environmental policy efforts, though, needs to be weighted against the urgency of alternative public policy objectives (e.g. education or public health), given that public budgets are limited In these settings, policy-makers are increasingly requested to give an economic justification for investing in conservation by providing evidence of the economic value that society places upon the environment (Martin-Ortega et al, 2015; Costanza et al, 2017). Policy-makers are increasingly requested to give an economic justification for investing in conservation by providing evidence of the economic value that society places upon the environment (Martin-Ortega et al, 2015; Costanza et al, 2017) Information on such values is though often missing, since many ecosystem services are not traded in markets and surrogate markets to infer ecosystem services' values are mostly absent. As argued by McFadden (2001), people's preferences and values are influenced by unobservable aspects, such as

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