Abstract
Coupled with green house effects, the urban heat island is occurring more frequently, and thus is becoming a serious social problem. In order to elicit policy implications, the current study assesses the economic values on the heat island-mitigating functions of urban forest through choice experiments. The analytical results suggest that metropolitan city residents’ utility can be increased by raising the size of life zone forests which is comprised of street trees, parks in residential regions, and small forests in school zones. The derived marginal willingness to pay for the life zone forests suggest that the respondents are willing to pay $56.68–76.59 for every increase of the urban forest by 1 m2.
Highlights
An urban heat island is a metropolitan region of which the temperature is significantly higher than its surrounding areas
For specifying the utility function, the attributes related with heat island effects, socioeconomic variables of individuals, and alternative specific constants (ASC) are included as follows
Since the random parameter logit model—which only includes the product attributes as explanatory variables as discussed above—cannot capture the impacts of socioeconomic variables, we included the interaction between the dummy that indicate any of presented options is selected and the socioeconomic variables for each individual in the empirical implementations of an random parameter model (RPL) model
Summary
An urban heat island is a metropolitan region of which the temperature is significantly higher than its surrounding areas. For one method of mitigating heat island effects, increasing the size of urban forest, is known to be very effective [5] (Other than forming life zone forest, alternative efforts are proven to be effective for mitigating heat island effect: installing green or cool roof [6,7,8], utilizing bioinspired retro-reflective building envelope [9], and changing to white roof [10]). The low level of urban forest in the metropolitan regions of Korea is due to the high population density compared with scarce city land. To overcome this limitation, the Korean government is investigating other methods for augmenting green areas in the metropolitan cities. In Korea, these green areas are known as life zone forests [11] (A life zone forest is defined as a forest that is relatively easy for urban dwellers to access without additional time or cost to reach it [11])
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