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ABSTRACT
Restoration offers opportunities for securing and enhancing critical ecosystem services provided by peatlands, such as carbon storage, water retention and water quality, and support for biodiversity and wildlife. A comprehensive valuation encompassing the relevant public benefits of restoration and how these compare with it is lacking to date, leaving policy makers with little guidance with respect to the economic efficiency of restoring this climate-critical ecosystem. Using Scotland as a case study, this paper quantifies the non-market benefits of changes in peatland ecological condition associated with changes in ecosystem service provision and depending on the location of restoration efforts. Benefits on a per hectare basis are compared to varying capital and recurrent cost in a net present value space, providing a benchmark to be used in decision making on investments into peatland restoration. The findings suggest that peatland restoration is likely to be welfare enhancing. Benefits also exceed cost in appraisals of previous and future public investments into peatland restoration. The results thus strengthen the economic rationale for climate change mitigation through improved peatland management.
Acknowledgments
Funding: Scottish Government Rural Affairs and the Environment Portfolio Strategic Research Programme 2011–2016 and 2016–2021, University of Leeds Social Sciences Impact Acceleration Account in association with the Economic and Social Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through the project ‘Understanding ecosystem stocks and tipping points in UK peatlands’ (grant number NE/P00783X/1). Thanks to all focus groups and survey participants. Special thanks to Andrew McBride, Rebekka Artz, Matt Aitkenhead, Willie Towers, Steve Chapman, Kathleen Allen, Anja Byg, Jacqueline Potts, Paula Novo, Carol Kyle, Murat Okumah and Ximena Maier. The authors declare that they do not receive any financial interest or benefit from the direct application of this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
2. The survey, and in particular the information materials, received a lot of positive feedback from respondents (discussed in Martin-Ortega et al. Citation2017). This caused us to develop the (slightly modified) version of the whole information package provided in the survey up to the description of choice scenarios into a communication tool, to be accessed here: http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/peatland-modules/?type=learning.
3. The sample analysed here was part of larger sample of 1,795 individuals comprising of three different split-samples for methodological purposes outside the scope of this paper.
4. It is important to note that, using a probit model, no selection bias could be detected that would indicate a systematic effect of a broad range of socio-demographic characteristics on choosing the cheapest alternative in all choice tasks (see Online Supplementary Materials S2).
