Willingness to pay for mangrove preservation in Xuan Thuy National Park, Vietnam: do household knowledge and interest play a role?

ABSTRACT

Xuan Thuy National Park, a special nature reserve with mangrove swamps located in the Red River Delta in North Vietnam, plays an important role in combating coastal erosion and provides a habitat for many endangered bird species. This study applied double-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation method to directly estimate how much locals are willing to pay for mangrove conservation at Xuan Thuy National Park. In particular, the technique was used to provide better assess to the non-use value of biodiversity and ecosystem support of mangroves. Survey respondents from 350 households in the buffer zone were presented with a hypothetical scenario describing a policy that quantifies the environmental change to be achieved by 2030, and specifying a lump sum payment. Non-parametric estimate of mean WTP was found at 511,090 VND per household (22.03 USD) whereas parametric estimate of mean WTP derived from the log-logistic specification was found at 619,908 VND (26.73 USD) per household. Awareness of mangrove benefit and interest in conservation activities have a positive impact on WTP responses, in addition to income. The findings will help policy-makers adopt sound environmental policies and advise locals on the importance of protecting the mangroves which in turn protect their livelihoods.

KEYWORDS:

• Mangrove preservation
• environmental services valuation
• contingent valuation
• double-bounded discrete choice
• Xuan Thuy National Park
• vietnam

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• Q51
• Q57
• O13

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Convention on Wetlands, called the Ramsar Convention, is an intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources.

2 We would like to thank one of the reviewers for these suggestions

3 Thanks one of the reviewers for comments on variable explanations

4 Details about the computation of these estimates are given in Aizaki, Nakatani, and Sato (2015). Truncated (at maximum bid) mean estimates are computed to avoid (i) having infinite value when the estimated value of initial bid parameter is lower than one, or (ii) getting some portion of the respondents who have an estimated WTP greater than their income. The adjusted truncated mean makes use of the normalisation proposed by Boyle, Welsh, and Bishop (1988). This normalisation allows to set the value of the cumulative distribution function of WTP as soon as WTP is greater than the maximum bid, to one.

5 The bootstrap method resamples the data at our hands and repeatedly estimates the model with the bootstrapped data to formulate an empirical distribution of the associated WTP. See Hole (2007) for more details. The number of bootstrap replications can be chosen following Davidson and MacKinnon (2000).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 502.01-2018.20.