Willingness to pay for management and preservation of natural, semi-urban and urban beaches in Italy

Abstract

Coastal management is "that process of managing a beach, whether by monitoring, simple intervention, recycling, recharge, the construction and maintenance of coastal control structures or by some combination of these techniques, in a way that reflects an acceptable compromise in the light of available finance, between the various coastal defence, nature conservation, public amenity and industrial objectives" (Micallef and Williams, 2002;Simm et al., 1996). This definition seems to consider the entire spectrum of coastal conflict in that it addresses social, economic and environmental aspects of beaches as socio-ecological systems (SES) (e.g. Defeo and McLachlan, 2005;Botero and Hurtado, 2009). This approach considered beaches as multidimensional systems linked with and affected by one or more social systems where natural, socio-economic and administrative components interact (Micallef, 1996;Micallef and Williams, 2002;Williams and Davies, 1999). Approaches to the management of beach as SES have traditionally focused on a very limited number of functions, such as beaches as summer playgrounds and buffer spaces for storms (James, 2000;Lozoya et al., 2014;Ariza et al., 2016). However, from the last century, beaches were expressly defined as SES especially due to new methodologies for capturing beach complexity in order to provide information Willingness to pay for management and preservation of natural, semi-urban and urban beaches in Italy Ilaria Rodella a, *

The Willingness to Pay for Beach Scenery and Its Preservation in Italy

“…In fact, about 60% of the interviewees were willing to pay for the preservation of the environmental quality of the landscape, with about 16 € per person each season. These percentages are slightly higher than 58% and 14.84 € reported in the Italian survey (conducted on 4126 records) by [72]. This result is probably due to the particular condition of the selected beaches that are more natural than those reported in [72].…”

“…These percentages are slightly higher than 58% and 14.84 € reported in the Italian survey (conducted on 4126 records) by [72]. This result is probably due to the particular condition of the selected beaches that are more natural than those reported in [72]. Therefore, users were more willing to respect the case of semiurban and urban beaches.…”

“…The system defined five classes of scenery based on the calculated D value [37], i.e., Beaches can be classified in many ways (e.g., by shape, use, urbanization level), but for this study, beaches have been classified following [72,73] and take into consideration their physical and recreational features.…”

“…A Double Bounded (DB) dichotomous choice was used to offer the second amount. This follow-up question depended on the beach users' reply to the first amount, as applied in [72] and suggested by [78]. A Double Bounded (DB) dichotomous choice was used to offer the second amount.…”

“…It means that the response function reflects a utility function U (j, Y, s), where j is a dichotomous variable associated with use of a given beach (j = 1, use of the good; j = 0, non-use of the good), Y is the individual income, and s is vector of the socio-economic characteristics. Following this approach, we estimated the WTP based on [72] model. Furthermore, we adopted socio-demographic features and knowledge about environmental issues as independent variables that affected the WTP.…”