Women Volunteerism for Protecting Watershed Ecosystem in Langat Basin

Abstract


 
 
 Forested watershed provides abundant ecosystem services for water users including catchment area protection, flood regulation, provisioning of clean drinking water and climate regulation. However, the value of ecosystem services only partially takes into account by policy makers and indirectly cause overexploitation of natural resources. This study observes the economic role of women in protecting watershed ecosystem by calculating willingness to pay (WTP). Langat Basin is an imperative watershed that supplying fresh water source and other necessities to approximately 1.2 million people within the catchment area. Langat Basin has getting the effect of hasty growth through industrialization and land development actions. Women within Langat Basin has been selected through face to face interview for measure willingness to pay (WTP) towards ecosystem protection. Single Bounded Dichotomous Choice technique in Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) is engaged to calculate WTP of women. Willingness to pay of women in upstream is RM184.28, followed by women in middle stream is RM168.60 and lastly WTP of women in downstream is RM190.16. The willingness to pay women shows that women has potential to be part of ecosystem protection and signal to policy makers to include women in decision making process especially for environmental perspective.