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ABSTRACT
This study aims to evaluate the non-market values of ecosystem services generated by wetlands in southern Quebec. To accomplish this, we evaluated the value of wetland services related to (1) habitat for biodiversity, (2) flood control, (3) water quality and (4) climate regulation. Two non-market valuation methods are proposed, contingent valuation and choice experiment. Our study aims to measure both the population's willingness to pay (WTP) for wetland preservation and restoration and to understand which environmental attributes and socioeconomic characteristics motivate people's responses. We also compared the results of the two methods. Our conclusion suggests that the two methods provide statistically convergent WTP values, both in total value and in relative importance for different attributes involved. Our result also confirms the coefficient equivalence between the estimation models using the data from the two methods.
Acknowledgments
The survey conducted for this study is one of two products of the economic aspects of a research project funded by the OURANOS grant 554015-104, entitled ‘Outils d'analyses hydrologique, économique et spatiale des services écologiques procurés par les milieux humides des basses terres du Saint-Laurent: adaptations aux changements climatiques’. We sincerely thank Richard Fournier for providing the funding for the survey and Richard Fournier, Jérôme Theau, Jean-Pierre Revéret, Mathieu Varin, Jean-Philippe Boyer and Fanny Moffette for their collaboration in the development of the questionnaire and Marc Girard for his contribution to GIS database. We also recognise the contribution of the Fondation Cowboys Fringants. Thomas G. Poder is a member of the FRQS-funded Centre de recherche du CHUS (CRCHUS).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. However, we cannot reject the possibility that both estimates are equally wrong, just as indicated in Hanley and Spash (Citation1994).
2. The scale of wetland restoration proposed in our study, seemingly large, is comparable to the 100% restoration scenario used in Pattison, Boxall, and Adamowicz (Citation2011) for the Manitoban wetlands case, which proposes an increase of wetland area of 407,000 acres, equal to 164,707 hectares.
3. A linear extrapolation with respect to the size of wetlands is used here to construct the various levels for the attributes in different scenarios. This simplified assumption about the linear relationship between the quality of ecological services and wetland size is for certain not ideal for extrapolation. However, since we do not have precise information about the geographical distribution of different ecological services considered in our paper, we could not propose better alternative assumption.
4. We assume here that people in general believe a linear correlation between the size of wetlands and the quality of ecological services that they can provide.
5. Due to colinearity, we cannot include the third income dummy that identifies people with low income.
6 We thank one of the two anonymous referees for this comment.
7 The coefficients reported in the multiplicative conditional logit model for different attributes are calculated with the CE sub-sample mean value of the related socioeconomic variables included into the multiplicative terms.
8. Excluding climate regulation attribute from random coefficient variable list is also necessary for our investigation about the parameter equality between CV and CE methods since pooling CV and CE data for RPL estimation will face the problem of under-identification problem if all the four ecological services are included into the list for random coefficient variables.
9. The marginal WTP for an attribute (say X, X∈biodiversity, flood, water quality, climate regulation)=.
10. We decide to use simple logit, simple conditional logit and RPL models to make comparison in calculated WTP value to avoid the potential bias created by the presence/omission of socioeconomic variables.
11. Whose result suffers from the bias related to its violation of IIAs.
12. The payment vehicle used in this paper is a municipal water and sanitation tax, to avoid the potential bias related to the universality nature of the payment vehicle, we explicitly indicated in our questionnaire (c.f. ) that this tax would be directly applied on house-owners and indirectly applied on tenants via an increase in house rent. We admit that this mention is not 100% efficient to avoid a potential WTP reducing influence for house-owners due to this specific payment vehicle. This influence is however, only found in CE data but not in CV data (c.f. the insignificant positive coefficient before variable houseowner).
13. The initial WTP per household per year reported in the paper is $295–$348 in 2008 price. We used the conversion factor calculated from consumer price index: 1 dollar in 2008 = 1.073 dollar in 2013 to calculate the equivalent value in 2013 Canadian dollars.
14. The initial WTP per household per year reported in the paper is $246--$254 in 2008 price. We used the conversion factor calculated from consumer price index: 1 dollar in 2008 = 1.073 dollar in 2013 to calculate the equivalent value in 2013 Canadian dollars.
15. The WTP for the conversion factor is calculated from consumer price index: 1 dollar in 2010 = 1.054 dollar in 2013.
16. Water provisioning, waste treatment, biodiversity habitat, disturbance protection and recreation.
17. Climate regulation, water provisioning, waste treatment, biodiversity habitat, disturbance protection, aesthetics and recreation.