Spatial disparities of the willingness of the residents to pay for the wetland restoration of Taihu Lake and its integration into decision making: a case study on Wuxi, China

Abstract

Many wetland restoration projects (WRPs) have been conducted to restore the wetland ecosystem since a massive bloom of cyanobacteria in Taihu Lake in the summer of 2007. The willingness to pay (WTP) of residents for wetland restoration was expected to exhibit spatial disparities that were used for decision making. In this study, correlation analysis, binary logistic regression, and linear regression were used to assess 400 questionnaires collected through a contingent valuation survey. Results indicated that WTP amounts and the probability of positive WTP decrease as the distance from the wetlands increases. Knowledge of WRPs was the only factor that influences whether the respondents pay in the close distance (<3 km) and medium distance districts (>3 and <10 km), whereas in the remote distance district (>10 km), gender and income also affected WTP decision aside from the knowledge of WRPs. In terms of WTP amounts, income was the determining factor in the three districts, whereas age was a factor in the medium distance area. Results also showed that the growth rate of the water price should vary according to the distance of the area from the location of the WRPs. The water price was recommended to be increased by US$ 0.522/ton, 0.520/ton, and 0.509/ton in the close, medium, and remote distance districts, respectively.

Gendered perspectives of ecosystem services: A systematic review

“…Women generally had more knowledge of water quality control, accorded it a higher importance or had a higher WTP for this service in most of the studies that we reviewed (Kisaka and Obi, 2015;Martin-Lopez et al, 2012;McKay et al, 2013;Shen et al, 2015). One study drew the opposite conclusion-that women usually have less (or even negative) WTP for this ecosystem service, possibly because women generally have a lower socioeconomic status than men do in this study area in China (He et al, 2015). Specifically, women were more sensitive to costs other than living expenses and were not willing to pay for wetland restoration efforts that would improve water quality.…”

“…Water quality control In general, women had more knowledge of/perceived more importance about/ had higher WTP of this ES type (Kisaka and Obi, 2015;Martin-Lopez et al, 2012;McKay et al, 2013;Shen et al, 2015) One case shows that women had lower WTP for this ES type than men (He et al, 2015) $$#…”

“…Many studies mentioned that gender differences in ecosystem service perceptions might arise due to the intersection of a number of factors, including educational backgrounds, culture, socioeconomic status, age, religious beliefs and access to information Allendorf and Yang, 2013;Calvet-Mir et al, 2016;Grilli et al, 2016;Shen et al2015). Another commonly cited limitation was whether the indicators or metrics these studies used to qualify responses truly reflect the relationship between gender and the specific ecosystem service in question (Dallimer et al, 2014;Hamann et al, 2015;He et al, 2015;Mensah et al, 2017;Vivithkeyoonvong and Jourdain, 2017;Yang et al, 2015).…”

“…Usually, the sample sizes in the qualitative studies were less than 50. Quantitative studies included sample sizes ranging from more than 3000 (Martin-Lopez et al, 2012) to less than 100 interviewees (He et al, 2015). This means that the conclusions drawn in some studies could suffer from scalability and contextspecificity of the research areas.…”

“…Only a few studies among the 51 ES-Gender papers mentioned the use of models (Hamann et al, 2015;He et al, 2015). In fields where quantitative research methods dominate-including modeling of ecosystems, water, and climate-gender most often remains absent from discussions and methods with a few exceptions (Baker et al, 2015;Villamor and van Noordwijk, 2016).…”