Abstract
BackgroundThe long-term evolution of preferences for nature is crucial to conservation projects, given their targeted long-term horizons. Neglecting to account for this evolution could lead to undesirable human–nature relationships. This study compares the willingness to pay (WTP) for three coastal conservation projects in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan, at two distant time points (1998 and 2015), and tests for temporal transferability. It also compares protest responses that are often overlooked in WTP practices, regardless of their utility for conservation projects.MethodsGiven the lack of a unanimous protocol for protest response analyses and their use in estimating WTP, we propose a comprehensive analytic framework that integrates the two.ResultsWe show that, while preferences for coastal ecosystem services were overall stable and temporarily transferable, the preferences for certain aspects of conservation projects considerably changed.DiscussionThis suggests the need to reconsider the projects’ scheme, not the ecosystem services themselves, along with the clarification of beneficiaries and those responsible for past destruction. We conclude by suggesting further studies with a focus on regions experiencing significant social-ecological changes, such as developing countries, by exploiting the rich asset of existing valuations. This could contribute to the database for more temporal-sensitive ecosystem service valuations utilized for benefit transfers.
Highlights
Understanding people’s valuations of nature and how they change in the long run is of crucial importance to establishing and sustaining desired relationships with nature (Uehara and Mineo, 2017; Uehara et al, 2016)
Our study aims to understand the long-term evolution of preferences for coastal ecosystem services by addressing the abovementioned underdeveloped yet crucial topics: evolution of welfare measured in willingness to pay (WTP) and that of protest responses
Since common WTP practices exclude protest responses and there is no unanimous protocol on how to deal with them (Meyerhoff and Liebe, 2010), we propose a comprehensive analytic framework that integrates WTP estimation and protest response analyses and comprises five research questions
Summary
Understanding people’s valuations of nature and how they change in the long run is of crucial importance to establishing and sustaining desired relationships with nature (Uehara and Mineo, 2017; Uehara et al, 2016). The potential evolution of preferences for nature indicates that a conservation project assuming constant preferences could mislead us to an undesired state. A key approach to understanding how people value nature (i.e., welfare) is measuring willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem services, whose techniques have been well-developed in environmental economics (Freeman et al, 2014; Gómez-Baggethun et al, 2010). There is scope for improvement in WTP-based studies; in particular, two aspects could foster better contributions to the literature. WTP studies generally conduct one-time estimates and relative to the time horizon for conservation projects, related research on the evolution of WTP are short termed (e.g., from few weeks to a year)
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