Environmental attitudes and preference for wetland conservation in Malaysia

Abstract

The incorporation of latent psychological factors in wetland valuation studies may improve our understanding of why some people value ecosystem services while others do not. This article focuses on public preferences for enhanced protection of the Setiu Wetland in Malaysia and explores the influence of environmental attitude on preference and the willingness to pay (WTP) for wetland conservation. The study reported here employs a discrete choice experiment to investigate household's WTP for a set of wetland attributes. A scale-adjusted latent class (SALC) model is applied to identify a latent preference structure combining choice attributes with attitude measures derived from the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP). We identified four NEP components in the respondent population to integrate with SALC model, and this revealed four latent classes and two scale classes which varied in their preferences. Class 1 was largely against wetland protection, although it showed a flooding preference, and was more likely to be 'Anthropocentric' but less likely to be 'Biocentric'. Class 2 had a positive preference for all attributes, and was more likely to be 'Biocentric'. Class 3 did not refer to any of the NEP components. A handful of responses in Class 4 were respondents more likely to be in the 'Risk of overuse' group and less likely to be 'Anthropocentric'. The result suggests that natural resource managers need to evaluate people's concerns over environmental protection to understand potentially conflicting views across populations.

Differences in Environmental Information Acquisition from Urban Green—A Case Study of Qunli National Wetland Park in Harbin, China

“…Crompton showed that attitudes influence tourists' choices of destinations, and the intrinsic motivation of tourists' values and interests can generate higher intention to visit a destination [27,28]. Suziana also showed that biosphere-centered people have an active visual preference for biodiversity [29]. We found that eco-society-hedonic tourists pay more attention to the biosphere environment and have a strong visual preference for wetland park plants.…”

Integrated Multi-Attribute Preference Analysis in Fisheries and Solar Power Symbiosis Areas: A Case Study in Cigu, Taiwan

“…The WTP for FSPS of the respondents in Cigu, Taiwan is lower than that in other countries. Moreover, Suziana [43] showed that the concern regarding the environmental issues of a Malaysian wetland influences respondents' WTP; hence, this study believes that the respondents' concern regarding environmental issues will influence their WTP for the development of FSPS.…”

“…Biodiversity reflects the range and diversity of animals and plants in the wetland and is often used as an indicator for assessing coastal ecosystems [33,35,38]. Suziana [43] adopted CEM to discuss the conservation of the Malaysian wetland ecosystem, with attributes including environmental conditions, biodiversity, recreational services, flood control, and subsidy changes. The FSPS policy to be implemented by the Taiwan government pays attention to developing green energy generation facilities without affecting the existing fishery production, and ensuring that the aquaculture production environment is optimized to reduce the labor input.…”

Heterogeneous preferences of citizens towards agricultural ecosystem services: the demand relevance in a choice experiment

“…Considering the relevance of the attributes, many studies differentiate between demand relevance and policy relevance (Blamey et al 1997;Abiiro et al 2014;Armatas et al 2014;Suziana 2017). The relevance of attributes is hence divided into two different aspects: 1) attributes are important to the respondents (demand relevance) and 2) attributes can be impacted by policy (policy relevance).…”

“…For example, Armatas et al (2014) and Kløjgaard et al (2012) used the concept of importance and emphasized the process of selecting important goods and attributes for respondents. According to Suziana (2017), 'demand-relevant attribute is the attribute that has meaning for those interviewed.' In turn, attributes have policy relevance when they are relevant to policy makers and can be affected by policy decisions.…”