Willingness to Pay for Crowdfunding Local Agricultural Climate Solutions

Abstract

The recent rise in climate concern among citizens worldwide is coinciding with a rising interest in agricultural climate solutions. The future scaling-up of these solutions, however, requires more knowledge about the mitigation potential, costs and financing options, including crowdfunding (CF). Our objective is to explore the driving factors behind the public’s willingness to pay for crowdfunded climate mitigation projects at the farm level. In this study, four mitigation options from the perspective of farmers were identified: solar panels on the barn roof, biogas from animal manure, drag hoses for improved manure dispersal, and the addition of biochar to soils. The study investigates the optimal characteristics of crowdfunding campaigns to finance such mitigation measures. The most influential factors on the respondents’ WTP is neither climate concern nor proximity, but instead the knowledge regarding CF, combined with how comprehensible and salient the suggested measure is. The main implications are that future projects that aim to achieve broad participation in CF campaigns need to communicate well, to improve both public knowledge of the funding mechanism (CF) itself and the comprehensibility and salience of the agricultural measure.

Crowdfunding Vs. Taxes: Does the Payment Vehicle Influence WTP for Ecosystem Services Protection?

“…However, its potential and properties as a PV have yet to be fully explored. In fact, only a few valuation studies use crowdfunding as a PV (Johnson, 2017;Kragt et al, 2021;Leiva, 2017;Roesch-McNally and Rabotyagov, 2016;Stoknes et al, 2021). Thus, our contribution to the existing literature is twofold.…”

Community financing for sustainable food and farming: a proximity perspective

“…Particularly investors in food crowdfunding demonstrate a strong bias towards projects in their home countries (Guo et al 2018 ). Recent evidence on crowdfunding of climate measures in agriculture also suggests that consumers have a higher willingness to pay for local measures (Stoknes et al 2021 ). Furthermore, geographical proximity appears to be particularly relevant in the early stage of a crowdfunding campaign (Agrawal 2015 ) and when explicitly local projects seek finance (Josefy et al 2017 ).…”

Public Perceptions of Faecal Sludge Biochar and Biosolids Use in Agriculture

“…It used Google Forms, a cloud-based data management tool for designing and developing web-based questionnaires. Online surveys provide time saving and cost saving benefits, less paper wastage, no interviewer bias, and allow the respondents to complete the survey in their own time [27]. However, they may present problems such as limiting access, low response rates and challenges in assuring anonymity [38,39].…”

“…The results of biochar addition would appear mainly in the soil and so would be "invisible" to the public. This was seen as generating feelings of bewilderment and disengagement rather than enthusiasm for the technology [27].…”