Estimating Residents’ Preferences of the Land Use Program Surrounding Forest Park, Taiwan

Chun-Hung Lee,Chiung-Hsin Wang

doi:10.3390/su9040598

Abstract

This paper aims to build up a preference function to evaluate the public benefits of the type of agricultural farming, biodiversity, water provisions, land use type, ecotourism modes, and a monetary attribute (willingness to pay and willingness to work) associated with an ecosystem service and land use program in a forest park. This study used choice experiments to build a random utility model, analyze the average preference for the above land use attributes based on the conditional logit (CL) and used a latent class model to test the residents’ heterogeneous preferences for land use planning in the forest park. We also estimated the welfare derived from various land use programs. The empirical result has shown that: (1) increasing organic farming area, increasing the surface water provision, increasing the area of custom flora, increasing the wetland area, and setting up an integrated framework for ecotourism increase the public’s preference for the land use program; (2) farmer and non-farmers do not have the same land use preferences, attributes, marginal willingness to pay and willingness to work; and (3) the ecotourism development program incorporating biodiversity, organic farming, ethnobotany, and wetland area with integrated ecotourism has the highest values when compared to other land use program scenarios.

Highlights

Ecosystem services have been considered as the framework for a new science able to uncover the co-evolution of humans and nature [1] and human dependence on ecosystem processes and biodiversity [2]
This kind of valuation could help the government to set up sustainable land use policy for the forest park based on the preferences of the local community, and set the priority for the budget allocation in land use programs based on the estimation of the conservation value, which includes the ecosystem services in the forest park
This study provides an important empirical contribution regarding the marginal effects of attributes for land use preferences

Summary

Introduction

Ecosystem services have been considered as the framework for a new science able to uncover the co-evolution of humans and nature [1] and human dependence on ecosystem processes and biodiversity [2]. Despite the political commitment to the designation of additional nature areas, ecosystems are still deteriorating [5] These changes have received considerable attention in land use policy, urban economics, and geography literature. Monetary valuation of ecosystem services aims to provide information about the values that society attributes to nature, taking into account uncertainty about future uses and the location specificity of values [6] This kind of valuation could help the government to set up sustainable land use policy for the forest park based on the preferences of the local community, and set the priority for the budget allocation in land use programs based on the estimation of the conservation value, which includes the ecosystem services in the forest park

Objectives

Results

Conclusion