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Abstract
The concept of ecosystem resilience is being increasingly discussed as a driver of values people attach to biodiversity. It implies that marginal deteriorations in ecosystem conditions can abruptly result in non-marginal and irreversible changes in ecosystem functioning and the economic values that the ecosystem generates. This challenges the traditional approach to the valuation of biodiversity, which has focused on quantifying values attached to individual species or other elements of ecosystems. As yet, little is known about the value society attaches to changes in ecosystem resilience. This paper investigates this value. A discrete choice experiment is conducted to estimate implicit prices for attributes utilized to describe ecosystem resilience using the Border Ranges rainforests in Australia as an example. We find evidence that implicit prices for the attributes used to infer the values people hold for ecosystem resilience are positive and statistically significantly different from zero.
Acknowledgements
Funding for the research presented in this paper was provided by the Australian Department of Sustainability Environment Water Population and Communities under the Commonwealth Environment Research Facility.
Notes
1. Likens (1992, p.9) defined the term ecosystem, which was introduced by Tansley (1935), as ‘a spatially explicit unit of the Earth that includes all of the organisms, along with all components of the abiotic environment’. Hooper et al. (2005) define ecosystem functioning as a ‘term that encompasses a variety of phenomena, including ecosystem properties, ecosystem goods, and ecosystem services (Christensen et al. 1996), although some researchers use the term ecosystem functioning as synonymous with ecosystem properties alone, exclusive of ecosystem goods and services. Ecosystem properties include both sizes of compartments (e.g., pools of materials such as carbon or organic matter) and rates of processes (e.g., fluxes of materials and energy among compartments). Ecosystem goods are those ecosystem properties that have direct market value. They include food, construction materials, medicines, wild types for domestic plant and animal breeding, genes for gene products in biotechnology, tourism, and recreation. Ecosystem services are those properties of ecosystems that either directly or indirectly benefit human endeavors, such as maintaining hydrologic cycles, regulating climate, cleansing air and water, maintaining atmospheric composition, pollination, soil genesis, and storing and cycling of nutrients (Christensen et al. 1996, Daily 1997)’.
2. An ecosystem shift does not necessarily imply a decrease in value to society. The alternative stable state may be equally desired or even more desired. However, this study focuses on ecosystem shifts where a decrease in social well-being is involved.
3. As noted by an anonymous reviewer, the workshop setting may result in group preferences rather than individual preferences being revealed.
4. As pointed out by Scarpa et al. (2008), the idea of willingness-to-pay space models wasoriginated by Cameron and James (1987) and Cameron (1988) and extended to multinomial choice models with random preferences by Sonnier et al. (2007) and Train and Weeks (2005).
5. To our knowledge, Scarpa et al. (2008) were the first to apply maximum simulated likelihood to random parameter models in willingness to pay space.
6. To ensure a negative sign of the cost parameter estimate, enters the utility function as
.
7. 1000 Halton draws using the ‘BIO’ algorithm available in Biogeme 2.0.
8. The main sample consists of 1941 respondents of the population of Brisbane at the age of 18 and above. Only permanent residents of Australia and Australian citizens qualified. The survey was online from 1 November 2010 to 30 November 2010.
9. Number of respondents invited to participate: 11,513; number of respondents participated but not qualified: 1502; number of respondents participated, qualified but not completed: 444; number of respondents participated, qualified but completed under 5minutes: 385; number of respondents participated, qualified and completed in 5 minutes or more: 1941.
10. We conducted three focus groups with 12–15 participants each.
11. The pilot sample consisted of 50 respondents.
12. Sándor and Wedel (2001) introduced Baysian efficient designs, while Ferrini and Scarpa (2007) were the first to use them in environmental applications.
13. The Bayesian Db-efficient design (100 Halton draws) was developed based on the calculation of the Db-error of randomly selected designs (10,000 iterations).
14. Respondents were not allowed to go backwards through the questions.
15. Household income; coded as the midpoint of income categories.
16. Effects coded: education_1 (1,0) ‘advanced diploma and certificate’; education_2 (0,1) ‘no non-school education’; education_3 (−1,−1) ‘graduate diploma, graduate certificate, and bachelor degree’.
17. Effects coded: 1 female; −1 male.
18. Willingness to pay for improvements in ecosystem resilience was defined as an equivalent surplus, assuming that respondents have an implied right to the reduced level of ecosystem resilience characterized by the status quo option. Respondents are therefore willing to pay for improved ecosystem resilience relative to the deteriorated state that would occur if no new policies are introduced.