The adoption of good practices for the economic valuation of environmental services (ES) has strong implications in the evaluation and design of a Payment for Environmental Services program. People’s willingness to pay for an ES is useful to evaluate whether money collected from users will be enough to cover both the providers’ opportunity costs and other costs generated by the institutional arrangements required for implementation. In this article, we use a numerical certainty scale to adjust answers to a valuation question aiming to correct for hypothetical bias associated with stated preference methods. Following this approach, the mean willingness to pay decreases by approximately 70%. Values that are more conservative could assure greater political and social support for the program because more ES users would want to participate in the program; simultaneously, however, it might suggest that the project is not completely funded.
ABSTRACT. Stated preference approaches, such as contingent valuation, focus mainly on the estimation of the mean or median willingness to pay (WTP) for an environmental good. Nevertheless, these two welfare measures may not be appropriate when there are social and political concerns associated with implementing a payment for environmental services (PES) scheme. In this paper the authors used a Bayesian estimation approach to estimate a quantile binary regression and the WTP distribution in the context of a contingent valuation PES application. Our results show that the use of other quantiles framed in the supermajority concept provides a reasonable interpretation of the technical nonmarket valuation studies in the PES area. We found that the values of the mean WTP are 10-37 times higher than the value that would support a supermajority of 70 per cent of the population.
Fire has always been part of the dynamics of Bolivia’s forest landscapes. However, the increasing frequency and intensity of large fires is threatening the sustainability of ecosystems and the livelihoods of vulnerable communities, mainly in the Chiquitania region of Santa Cruz Department. Local communities are assuming an active and responsible role in fire management. However, stronger partnerships and technical assistance are still required to consolidate good practices, mainly those related to the use of and access to information and communication technologies. This presents an opportunity to target digital inclusion policies that provide incentives to local communities to strengthen early warning and risk-reduction mechanisms.
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