Evaluating the Public’s Preferences toward Sustainable Planning under Climate and Land Use Change in Forest Parks

Chun-Lin Lee,Chun-Hung Lee,Chiung-Hsin Wang,Supasit Sriarkarin

doi:10.3390/su11113149

Abstract

Balancing the goals of sustainable planning under climate and land use change (CLUC) with ecosystem service functions is a huge challenge for the management and programming of protected areas today. We construct a new evaluation framework towards the perspectives of sustainable land management based on the choice experiment (CE) model, and apply it to investigate the public’s preferences for the forest parks in Taiwan. This study found that implementing organic farming, increasing species populations, increasing the acreage of secondary forest area, and developing an integrated framework for ecotourism would best satisfy the public’s preferences for sustainable land use management. Second, we identify that the heterogeneity of the public’s preferences for forest park management varies depending on whether individuals are (1) members of environmental groups, (2) agricultural landowners, and (3) residents of the municipality. Third, we find integrated land use programs generate the highest welfare values among scenarios comprising different financial attributes.

Highlights

Extreme climate conditions and rapid changes in land use and development have created a crisis for land resources around the globe [1,2]
Besides the attributes of LAND2 and LAND3, the other attributes are significant in the choice of a sustainable land management (SLM) strategy in the forest park
This means respondents prefer those strategies that would result in implementation of organic farming, an increase in populations of species, an increase in secondary forest area, and the development of an integrated framework for ecotourism

Summary

Introduction

Extreme climate conditions and rapid changes in land use and development have created a crisis for land resources around the globe [1,2]. Climate system changes occur in response to greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes, which relate closely to land use decisions [4,5]. Land use change has been shown to play a major role in studies on global climate and environmental change [3,8,9,10]. Land use management can be conceptualized as a human social issue that is closely linked to natural, ecological, and environmental phenomena. It plays a major role in protecting ES [3,4]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion