Willingness to pay for the conservation of the endangered Red-crowned Crane in China: Roles of conservation attitudes and income

Abstract

This study uses a choice experiment design to elicit the public's willingness to pay (WTP) for the highly endangered Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis) in Yancheng National Wetland Nature Reserve (YNWNR) in coastal China. It particularly analyzes the extent to which marginal WTP (MWTP) is influenced by conservation attitudes and income. Using a dataset collected from 262 respondents from Beijing through an intercept survey administered in 2014 and focusing on conservation outcome and measures as attributes, we find that mean MWTP for a 10% increase in the share of Crane population wintering in YNWNR in global population, a 10% increase in natural wetland habitat area in YNWNR, and 10% reduction in pesticide use on adjacent farmland are RMB 35, 29, and 14, respectively. The study further finds that conservation attitudes have a positively significant correlation with respondents' MWTP for the conservation outcome, while family income is significantly and positively correlated with their MWTP for the conservation measure such as increasing in natural wetlands in the Reserve. This implies that awareness promotion programs designed to increase the public's conservation awareness may only be effective to increase the public's WTP conservation programs with clearly targeted conservation outcomes while programs designed to increase income might be conducive to increase the public's willingness to pay for conservation measures. Thus, policy interventions designed to increase the public's support for conservation need to consider whether they target for increasing public's awareness or their income.