Valuing the visual impact of wind farms: A calculus method for synthesizing choice experiments studies

Abstract

Despite the great potential of mitigating carbon emission, development of wind farms is often opposed by local communities due to the visual impact on landscape. A growing number of studies have applied nonmarket valuation methods like Choice Experiments (CE) to value the visual impact by eliciting respondents' willingness to pay (WTP) or willingness to accept (WTA) for hypothetical wind farms through survey questions. Several meta-analyses have been found in the literature to synthesize results from different valuation studies, but they have various limitations related to the use of the prevailing multivariate meta-regression analysis. In this paper, we propose a new meta-analysis method to establish general functions for the relationships between the estimated WTP or WTA and three wind farm attributes, namely the distance to residential/coastal areas, the number of turbines and turbine height. This method involves establishing WTA or WTP functions for individual studies, fitting the average derivative functions and deriving the general integral functions of WTP or WTA against wind farm attributes. Results indicate that respondents in different studies consistently showed increasing WTP for moving wind farms to greater distances, which can be fitted by non-linear (natural logarithm) functions. However, divergent preferences for the number of turbines and turbine height were found in different studies. We argue that the new analysis method proposed in this paper is an alternative to the mainstream multivariate meta-regression analysis for synthesizing CE studies and the general integral functions of WTP or WTA against wind farm attributes are useful for future spatial modelling and benefit transfer studies. We also suggest that future multivariate meta-analyses should include non-linear components in the regression functions.