Valuing high‐seas ecosystem conservation

Abstract

The high seas provide a variety of ecosystem services that benefit society. There have, however, been few attempts to quantify the human welfare impacts of changes to the delivery of these benefits. We assessed the values of several key ecosystem service benefits derived from protecting ecosystems in the high seas of the Flemish Cap through choice experiments conducted in Canada, Norway, and Scotland. Rather than solely eliciting public willingness to pay, we also explored the determinants of variance in the estimates of willingness to pay. We aimed to determine how much respondents were willing to pay for high-seas ecosystems conservation, which factors influence individuals' willingness to pay, and whether individuals in Canada had a higher willingness to pay relative to those living in Norway and Scotland. This latter point captures distance-decay effects. On average, the public placed positive value on conserving high-seas ecosystems and on developing economic activities related to the exploitation and exploration of marine resources, despite a lack of awareness and familiarity with these environments. Distance-decay effects on willingness to pay were not clear. Scots had the highest willingness to pay and the Norwegians the lowest willingness to pay for all attributes, with the only exception being willingness to pay for a large increase in new jobs, in which case Canadians' willingness to pay was higher than Scots'. The public's willingness to pay was influenced by sociodemographic characteristics and their perceptions of highseas ecosystems. Our results provide evidence of the impacts of high-seas governance on human welfare and that improved governance could increase the value people place on high-seas ecosystems and the services they produce.

Have environmental preferences and willingness to pay remained stable before and during the global Covid-19 shock?

“…The survey of public preferences towards protecting high-sea ecosystems on the Flemish Cap was designed based on previous surveys of public preferences for protecting national deep-sea ecosystems conducted in Norway and Scotland ( Ankamah-Yeboah et al, 2021 ). The survey design followed best practice guidelines ( Johnston et al, 2017 ) and is further described in Xuan et al (2021) who present results using the original 2019 dataset. 2…”

Investigating consumer preferences for known wild provenance of plants within the horticultural trade

“…then followYao et al (2014) andXuan et al (2021) and employ a two-stage approach to explain our WTP estimates in terms of respondent socio-economic characteristics. This entailed estimation of several ordinary least squares (OLS) models with individual attribute WTP estimates being the dependent variable.…”