Abstract
State and local governments develop policies that promote environmentally friendly landscaping practices with the goal to mitigate adverse environmental impacts from heavily maintained residential lawns. One of the mechanisms to achieve low-input landscaping practices in the urban environment is to promote the conversion of monoculture turfgrass lawns into partial turfgrass, low-input landscapes. Rebate incentives are used as an instrument to encourage the adoption of such landscapes. This study investigates the effects of households’ monetary incentive requirement on households’ preferences and willingness to pay for low-input landscapes. The discrete choice experiment method was used to analyze responses from households categorized into low, medium, and high incentive requirement groups. The results show that rebate incentives may have significant positive effects on individuals’ intentions to adopt low-input landscapes. Participants with low incentive requirement were willing to pay more for environmentally friendly attributes, compared with their counterparts in the medium and high incentive requirement groups. Practical implications for relevant stakeholders are discussed.
Highlights
Urban sprawl in the United States continually adds constraints on water quantity and quality [1].Due to the high investment of building new water supply infrastructure, in recent years, water conservation has increasingly relied on demand-side management strategies [2,3,4]
Over the past several decades, water conservation programs increasingly focused on residential outdoor irrigation, which represents the largest portion of total household water consumption [5,6]
While rates and restrictions directly influence households to reduce water consumption, monetary incentives promote the installation of water-efficient features, such as toilets, faucets, efficient washing machines, smart irrigation systems, and low-input/environmentally friendly landscapes (EFLs)
Summary
Urban sprawl in the United States continually adds constraints on water quantity and quality [1]. While rates and restrictions directly influence households to reduce water consumption, monetary incentives promote the installation of water-efficient features, such as toilets, faucets, efficient washing machines, smart irrigation systems, and low-input/environmentally friendly landscapes (EFLs). The first objective was to investigate whether homeowners’ requirement of specific rebate incentives affects their preference for low-input landscapes This was examined by segmenting homeowners into different groups by their incentive requirement thresholds. Homeowners in the low monetary incentive requirement group will be more likely to be willing to pay premiums for low-input landscape attributes and accept offered rebate rates, compared to households in the medium and high monetary incentive groups (H1a). Households in the high monetary incentive requirement group will be less likely to accept rebate rates and will not be willing to pay premiums for low-input attributes (H1b). We hypothesized that the environmental benefits information will interact with the offered rebate incentives to improve homeowners’ EFL preferences (H2a), especially for homeowners in the low prior monetary incentive preference group (H2b)
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