Public perception of forest ecosystem services in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Ecosystem service assessment has become an emerging lobbying tool in recent years, relatively, less studies use non-economic methods to explore the society’s demand for ecosystem services from the perspective of human values, attitudes and beliefs. With Taiwan household registration records, this study conducted a survey involving mailing out questionnaires to ordinary households as sampling population. The purposes of this study are to understand Taiwanese people’s views on forest ecosystem services, and to analyze factors that affect people’s perception of the importance of forest ecosystem services. The results show that the respondents believe that soil conservation service is the most important. However, the non-economic cognitive analysis and economic evaluation show that the priority of forest ecosystem services is not consistent. In addition, this study shows that social and economic variables such as gender, occupation, and income have significant differences in different clusters of perception of the importance of ecosystem services. It is recommended that before any policy or protection action is taken in the future, the design should be strengthened to reflect the attitudes and preferences of stakeholders, inclusive of environmental, economic and social values to present the concept of human well-being, so that specific strategies can be more easily formulated to adapt to the actual situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Forest ecosystem services
• forest value
• people’s perception
• social value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).