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What role do people think distributional aspects should play in the design of climate policy? The literature assessing climate policies has shown that assumptions regarding peoples’ distributional preferences for climate change policy impacts are central for policy assessment, but empirical evidence for such preferences is lacking. We design a discrete choice experiment that varies how climate policies affect the income of future generations living in three geographical regions, with distinctly different current and predicted future income levels. The experiment is implemented on a sample of the Danish population and preferences are modelled in a latent class model. Our results show that a small majority of the sample (60%) hold preferences consistent with inequity aversion with respect to future income effects of climate policies across regions. For the same group, we find that preferences for co-benefits for current generations reflect a form of altruism, but not inequity aversion. In both cases, the altruistic aspects are moderated by an element of preferences for positive outcomes in own region too. The remaining classes display preferences with a varying focus on impacts in their own region or simply no support for further climate policy. Our results provide some support for the inclusion of social preferences regarding distributional effects of climate change policies in policy assessments, and hence for the significant impact on policy, this inclusion will have. What role do people think distributional aspects should play in the design of climate policy? The literature assessing climate policies has shown that assumptions regarding peoples’ distributional preferences for climate change policy impacts are central for policy assessment, but empirical evidence for such preferences is lacking. We design a discrete choice experiment that varies how climate policies affect the income of future generations living in three geographical regions, with distinctly different current and predicted future income levels. The experiment is implemented on a sample of the Danish population and preferences are modelled in a latent class model. Our results show that a small majority of the sample (60%) hold preferences consistent with inequity aversion with respect to future income effects of climate policies across regions. For the same group, we find that preferences for co-benefits for current generations reflect a form of altruism, but not inequity aversion. In both cases, the altruistic aspects are moderated by an element of preferences for positive outcomes in own region too. The remaining classes display preferences with a varying focus on impacts in their own region or simply no support for further climate policy. Our results provide some support for the inclusion of social preferences regarding distributional effects of climate change policies in policy assessments, and hence for the significant impact on policy, this inclusion will have.

Europe's forest provide multiple ecosystem services for societies, ranging from provisioning (e.g. wood) and regulating (e.g. climate mitigation and biodiversity) to cultural (e.g. recreation) services. In this paper, we assess the state and prospects of forest ecosystem services provision in Europe, introducing new data from the European collaborative research projects SINCERE, NOBEL and CLEARING HOUSE, and combining it with findings from the literature. We identify six challenges (1 an insufficient alignment of FES supply and demand, 2 lacking policy integration, 3 ambiguous and conflicting regulatory frameworks, 4 a lack of precise information on FES demand and provision, and innovations to align both, 5 an increasing pressure to adapt to climate change, and 6 a striking diversity constraining European level policy solutions) and three opportunities (1 increasingly heterogenous forest owner objectives potentially matching pluralistic societal demands, 2 diversifying forest enterprises levering innovations in regulating and cultural ecosystem services provision, and 3 the potential of forests to mitigate climate change). Subsequently, we introduce four distinct but complimentary policy pathways for European forest policy to better align forest ecosystem services provision and demand: 1 Better monitoring of FES supply and demand, 2 Enhanced policy integration, 3 Payments for ecosystem services, and 4 Bottom-up participation and learning among ecosystem services innovators. We conclude by emphasizing the momentum that the EU Green Deal unfolds for a future European forest policy to incentivise the provision of multiple forest ecosystem services.

Forests provide ecosystem services, including timber production. In some cases, private forest owners perform management actions in order to enhance the provision of such services, or they may be encouraged by public policies and payments. This paper focuses specifically on the decision to set forest land aside for biodiversity conservation, as part of the more general question of the efficiency of multiple-use vs. specialised management of forest lands. We propose an econometric analysis to identify factors in the set-aside choice and measure the impact of this decision on forest management costs. The results show that the set-aside choice depends on the landowners’ income and motivations related to forest amenities. The choice of specialised management, as reflected in the set-aside decision, has a significant and positive impact on the intensity of management in the remainder of the forest and on management costs. From a policy implications point of view, these results suggest that instruments such as forest certification, subsidies and reverse auctions for conservation will be most likely to attract the interest of those forest owners with personal motivations and forest properties that offer both benefit and cost advantages in opting for such specialised management strategies.

Efficient biodiversity conservation may rest on support for transnational cooperation; particularly for migratory species. Support for transnational conservation efforts may hinge on key issues like the potential outcomes and whether any collaboration aspect is highlighted. We designed an experiment focused on conservation of open land habitats in Denmark and the Netherlands. We tested how support of Danish households depends on framing in a context of possible losses of habitats and on possible contributions from Dutch households to the conservation case. We further tested for presence of loss aversion in outcomes and income. We found that the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for gains in open land habitats at home tended to increase when habitat losses were possible. Framing in the context of others, Dutch households, contributing consistently affected Danes' WTP for increasing protected habitat areas and for avoiding habitat losses. And the less Dutch households contributed, the more Danish households contributed with the converse also being true. Our results suggest that overall support for habitat conservation for migratory birds may be higher in cases where a risk of habitat losses exists. Results also suggest that support for conservation at home increase when respondents perceive that they share the challenge with other countries.

Real option applications in conservation have showed that with irreversibility and uncertainty about the value of preservation decisions may change. More specifically, returns must be high enough to also pay out the value of waiting if conversion into more intensive land uses is to become optimal. However, many environmental policies today focus on nature restoration, where conversion has previously taken place. In this study, we therefore reverse the problem and ask when to afforest productive agricultural land, when we face uncertainty about the value of ecosystem services delivered by afforestation. Furthermore, projects such as afforestation are often associated with joint production of forest products and environmental goods, like biodiversity, hunting, groundwater production, carbon storage, recreation etc. Thus, we extend state-of-the-art models to handle two additive ecosystem services, which both are uncertain and may be correlated. The joint production aspect increases the value of conversion, the stopping value, and hence the incentives to afforest. Increasing uncertainty decreases this incentive, as expected. However, contrary to the existing literature evaluating exclusive options, less than perfect correlation between the values of future ecosystem services decreases the value of the real option and increases the set of states, where afforestation is the preferred decision. This causes afforestation to be attractive for a wider set of states of the world than otherwise and has implications where joint production is feasible. We discuss these findings and the potential application of this analysis for handling real options with joint production in other research domains.

A better understanding of how society anticipates and adapts to future changes is critical to inform impact assessment and to develop timely and well-targeted policies to support adaptation. However, the forward-looking adaptation process remains poorly understood. In this paper we introduce choice experiment as a useful approach to investigate how households prefer to adapt livelihoods ex ante to the economic impact of climate and policy changes. This allows us to frame adaptation decisions within the random utility theory and explicitly quantify the likelihoods of particular adaptation choices given varied attributes of contextual changes and households. We collected data from 162 rural households in three Chinese mountain villages. Overall, households chose primarily to increase efforts in agriculture activities or stick to current livelihood portfolios. The results of a Mixed Logit model indicated that households’ choice of agriculture was certain while their adoption of non-agriculture livelihoods to safeguard the households from future changes. Moreover, several possibilities were evaluated for policy interventions to build adaptive capacity of households and facilitate adaptation. Such measures could, for instance, focus on supporting agricultural inputs, providing access to credit as well as practical skills training.

So far, consumer housing values have not been addressed as factors affecting the market diffusion potential of multi-storey wood building (MSWB). To fill the void, this study addresses different types of consumer housing values in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (i.e., Nordic region), and whether they affect the likelihood of prejudices against building with wood in the housing markets. The data collected in 2018 from 2191 consumers in the Nordic region were analyzed with exploratory factor analysis and logistic binary regression analysis. According to the results, consumers’ perceptions on ecological sustainability, material usage and urban lifestyle were similar in all countries, while country-specific differences were detected for perceptions on aesthetics and natural milieus. In all countries, appreciating urban lifestyle and living in attractive neighborhoods with good reputation increased the likelihood of prejudices against wood building, while appreciation of aesthetics and natural milieus decreased the likelihood of prejudices. In strengthening the demand for MSWB and sustainable urbanization through actions in businesses (e.g., branding) and via public policy support (e.g., land zoning), few messages derive from the results. In all, abreast with the already existing knowledge on the supply side factors (e.g., wood building innovations), more customized information is needed on the consumer-driven issues affecting the demand potential of MSWB in the housing markets. This would enable, e.g., both enhancing the supply of wooden homes for consumers appreciating urban lifestyle and neighborhoods and fortifying positive image of wood among consumers especially appreciating good architecture and pleasant environmental milieus.

Two important aspects of global environmental problems are that (1) the actions of past generations affect the opportunities of the present, and (2) both in the past and the present generations, collaboration across different countries is needed to provide global public goods. In this paper, we study how these two aspects influence public good provisions by running simultaneous intercountry laboratory experiments using a modified public goods game in Denmark, Spain and Ghana. While the theoretical predictions of the modified public goods game do not differ from that of the standard public goods game, our experimental results show otherwise. Pooling across results from our Danish, Spanish and Ghanaian participants, we find that present-generation individuals contribute a higher percentage of their endowments when they have better institutions and a lower percentage of their endowments when they have higher endowments. We also find that present-generation individuals contribute less to transnational public goods only when their initial conditions have not been affected by past-generation contributions.

Several discrete choice experiment studies have investigated issues in the design of incentive programs to enhance the provision of ecosystem services. In these studies, ownership of land is usually private, and landowners make decisions independently of each other. However, the assumption of independence may be invalid when decision making involves a spatial setting and social networks. This study presents a new approach that accounts for social cooperation and preference interdependence across farmers in a land management context with mixed ownership. We formulate an econometric model of implicit choice set formation that accounts for (1) farmers’ expectations regarding mutual positive benefits from cooperation in an integrated land management system, and (2) the potential interdependence of preferences across farmers within the same socio-spatial group. We show that cooperation expectations matter for the decision of whether to engage in cooperative management and also for welfare estimates. Our model can identify sources of heterogeneities arising from cooperation expectations in ways that would not be possible using a reduced-form choice model. The assumption of independence should be checked routinely in similar settings to avoid potential endogeneity problems in discrete choice models when dealing with data that have a social-spatial dimension. Several discrete choice experiment studies have investigated issues in the design of incentive programs to enhance the provision of ecosystem services. In these studies, ownership of land is usually private, and landowners make decisions independently of each other. However, the assumption of independence may be invalid when decision making involves a spatial setting and social networks. This study presents a new approach that accounts for social cooperation and preference interdependence across farmers in a land management context with mixed ownership. We formulate an econometric model of implicit choice set formation that accounts for (1) farmers’ expectations regarding mutual positive benefits from cooperation in an integrated land management system, and (2) the potential interdependence of preferences across farmers within the same socio-spatial group. We show that cooperation expectations matter for the decision of whether to engage in cooperative management and also for welfare estimates. Our model can identify sources of heterogeneities arising from cooperation expectations in ways that would not be possible using a reduced-form choice model. The assumption of independence should be checked routinely in similar settings to avoid potential endogeneity problems in discrete choice models when dealing with data that have a social-spatial dimension.

The behavior among peers may be interpreted as useful information in individuals' decision processes, although such observational learning is typically not accommodated in consume choice models. This study incorporates information about other consumers' behavior in a choice experiment to evaluate if it affects choice probabilities. Market share is used as a proxy to signal that a product is chosen by many of the individual's peers. Although the effect is associated with diversity, there is a segment of individuals that perceive high market shares to carry relevant information for their food purchasing decision. Respondents who expect to hold similar or more positive preferences towards an unfamiliar food attribute relative to their peers are positively affected by a high market share. Taking information signals from peers' behavior into account may improve understanding of consumer behavior and improve our ability to predict the reception of new food aspects. [EconLit Citations: Q18; D12; D83].

The hedonic pricing method has been used extensively to obtain implicit prices for availability of urban green space, but few have obtained households' preference parameters. We elicit preferences and estimate willingness to pay functions for park availability in Copenhagen using an approach that places identifying restrictions on the utility function. We do this for two different measures of park availability and examine sources of preference heterogeneity. We find that the implicit price of another hectare of park within a 1000 m radius is 53.25 EUR per ha per year for the average apartment corresponding to an increase in annual rent of 0.33% per additional ha. For reducing distance to the nearest park by a meter, the price is 0.59 EUR per meter per year, corresponding to an increase in annual rent of 0.03‰ per meter. We apply our results to a policy scenario reducing the park area available in an area of central Copenhagen and show how estimates of aggregate welfare changes are highly sensitive to the measure of park availability applied. The findings stress the importance of paying attention to how public goods are defined when undertaking welfare economic policy analyses.

This study addresses the attitudes of the urban and rural dwellers towards Setiu Wetlands conservation. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is adopted to measure the degree of environmental concern. A series of factor analysis and regression is applied to analyze the urban-rural attitudes and to suggest three factors structure of attitudes to wetland conservation. The urban-rural residential variable is able to predict in part the overall NEP scores and element of anti-anthropocentrism which suggesting the urban communities are more positive towards wetland conservation. Hence, further outreach efforts in rural population are worthwhile to raise conservation awareness. This study addresses the attitudes of the urban and rural dwellers towards Setiu Wetlands conservation. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is adopted to measure the degree of environmental concern. A series of factor analysis and regression is applied to analyze the urban-rural attitudes and to suggest three factors structure of attitudes to wetland conservation. The urban-rural residential variable is able to predict in part the overall NEP scores and element of anti-anthropocentrism which suggesting the urban communities are more positive towards wetland conservation. Hence, further outreach efforts in rural population are worthwhile to raise conservation awareness.

Coordination of conservation policies and conservation actions between countries is expected to reduce overall costs and increase effectiveness. It rests on the assumption that, as a global public good, the provision of biodiversity conservation is independent of geographical and political jurisdictions. However, from a welfare economic perspective this assumption requires testing and justification. Indeed, distance may matter, as may the country of provision. This study applies a choice experiment to estimate individuals' marginal willingness to pay for comparable biodiversity conservation measures and outcomes across country borders, and with different distances from their place of residence to conservation locations in Denmark and in Southern Sweden. The case is designed to distinguish the effect of distance from the effect of country of residence versus country of provision. We find a clear and distinguishable effect of both location and country of provision. We find distance-related attributes to reflect bridge tolls and per-kilometre transport costs, and Swedes and Danes to prefer provision in their own country, over provision in the neighbouring country. The results of this study may be useful in discussing cooperation on regional and even global biodiversity conservation efforts.

We present the results of a large-scale analysis on how on-shore and off-shore wind turbines affect the property prices of nearby single family residential and vacation homes in Denmark. We find that on-shore wind turbines negatively affect the price of surrounding properties to a distance of three kilometers. The negative impact increases with the number of wind turbines at a declining marginal rate but declines with distance. In the case of off-shore wind turbine farms, we do not find a significant effect of having an off-shore wind farm in view from a property itself or from the nearest beach, likely because the closest off-shore turbine is 9 km from the closest traded home. We illustrate the policy relevance of our findings by providing maps showing how the marginal impact of a wind turbine varies across the landscape according to the spatial distribution of home density and homes values in the proximity of a wind turbine site. The results suggest that ceteris paribus, wind turbine farms should be built quite far away from residential areas with turbines gathered in larger wind farms rather than installed as single turbines.

Selecting appropriate payment vehicles is critical for the perceived consequentiality and incentive compatibility of stated preferences surveys. We analyze the performance of three different payment vehicles in a Malaysian case of valuing wetland conservation. Two are well-known: voluntary donations and income taxes. The third is new: reductions in government subsidies for daily consumer goods. Using donations is common, but this payment vehicle is prone to issues of free-riding. An income tax usually has favorable properties and is commonly used in environmental valuation. However, in Malaysia as well as in many other low- to middle-income economies, large proportions of people do not pay income taxes, putting the validity of this payment vehicle into question. Instead, citizens in Malaysia and many other countries benefit from subsidies for a range of consumer goods. We find that price sensitivity is higher and the unexplained variance smaller when using subsidies rather than donations or income taxes. Importantly, this approach translates into completely different conclusions concerning policy advice. Our results suggest that in developing countries, using reduced subsidies as a payment vehicle may have favorable properties in terms of improved payment consequentiality compared to alternative payment vehicles, thus enhancing the external validity of stated preference surveys.

We designed a discrete choice experiment testing valence-based framing of climate policy outcomes for future generations, a moral good involving altruistic trade-offs. Specifically, we explore how a gain and loss framing influence social preferences for the distributional outcomes of climate policy. Respondents are asked to consider climate policy alternatives with two main outcomes affecting three regions of the world: Income effects for future generations caused by climate change, which the respondents may not be affected by, and a present generation co-benefit from mitigation efforts, which could benefit the respondents directly. Using a sample of the Danish population, we find a significant difference in the estimated preference structure for climate policies when future income effects are framed as losses in income for future generations relative to when framed as regained income. However, the welfare measures reveal that the framing did not generate significantly higher value estimates for the framed income effect attribute. Instead, the framing resulted in increased willingness to pay for additional climate policy initiatives per se, and higher value estimates for the unframed, present generation co-benefit. We interpret these results drawing on the behavioural science and economic literature on framing and reference point dependent preferences.

Payments for environmental services (PES) are compensating landowners or resource stewards for safeguarding ecosys-tem externalities not accounted for in the marketplace (Ferraro and Kiss, 2002; Wunder, 2007; Engel et al., 2008). PES couldbecome an important tool for forest-based climate change mitigation under REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestationand forest Degradation including conservation, sustainable forest management and enhancement of forest carbon stocks) (Wunder 2009), and be a quick way to reduce carbon emissions (Stern, 2007; Angelsen, 2008).

Consumers are apprehensive about transgenic technologies, so cisgenics, which limit gene transfers to sexually compatible organisms, have been suggested to address consumer concerns. We study consumer preferences for rye bread alternatives based on transgenic or cisgenic rye, grown conventionally or without the use of pesticides, relative to traditionally bred rye, grown with conventional or organic farming methods. Stated preference (SP) data from a choice experiment are combined with revealed preference (RP) data from market purchases from the same respondents. Results show that respondents prefer pesticide-free production methods, and that while cisgenics is preferred over transgenics, the majority of respondents favour traditional breeding methods. The distribution in preferences suggests that some respondents prefer bread from cisgenic crops produced without pesticides over traditional crops produced using pesticides. Preferences for organic bread are stronger than for pesticide-free products. From a policy perspective results suggest that excluding cisgenics from mandatory labeling in the EU, or including it in the voluntary non-GM labelling in the US, would cause welfare losses for consumers.

We propose a spatial multi-criteria decision analysis approach as a value-focused decision support tool for evaluating land use change decisions affecting multiple ecosystem services. In an empirical case study concerned with creating a robust and interconnected network of natural areas in a Danish municipality, we first conduct a biophysical and economic baseline mapping of ecosystem services. We then construct a spatially explicit multi-criteria decision analysis model which is utilized to identify candidate areas for inclusion in the network. We define a base scenario for future land use in the area, where all criteria have equal weight, and assess the outcome in terms of welfare economic benefits of ecosystem services and opportunity cost of reducing forest and agricultural production. As weights in multi-criteria analysis is innately a subjective task, we conduct a sensitivity analysis using four corner solution scenarios. The analyses illustrate the possible range of impacts and highlight the specific trade-offs between different ecosystem services. We argue that a multi-criteria decision analysis approach will help inform decision makers in a structured and informative way when considering future land use changes.

Preference elicitation among outdoor recreational users is subject to measurement errors that depend, in part, on survey planning. This study uses data from a choice experiment survey on recreational SCUBA diving to investigate whether self-reported information on respondents’ comfort when they complete surveys correlates with the error variance in stated choice models of their responses. Comfort-related variables are included in the scale functions of the scaled multinomial logit models. The hypothesis was that higher comfort reduces error variance in answers, as revealed by a higher scale parameter and vice versa. Information on, e.g., sleep and time since eating (higher comfort) correlated with scale heterogeneity, and produced lower error variance when controlled for in the model. That respondents’ comfort may influence choice behavior suggests that knowledge of the respondents’ activity patterns could be used to plan the timing of interviews to decrease error variance in choices and, hence, generate ...

We examined the preferences for wetland conservation among urban and rural dwellers in Malaysia. A choice experiment using face-to-face interviews with urban and rural households was employed. Wetland conservation alternatives were described in terms of environmental protection zones, biodiversity protection, recreational services and flood. Each alternative was connected to a cost for the household, which was a reduction in subsidies for daily goods. Using a latent class model, we identified three groups with distinctly different preferences. The first group comprised mainly rural people with negative willingness to pay for conservation, while the second group included mostly urban people who favored wetland conservation and exhibited positive preference for wetland attributes. The third group was also consisted of mainly urban people who exhibited both negative and positive preferences toward different aspects of conservation. All three groups, however, asserted a strong preference for significant flood risk reduction. The results indicated potential conflicts over wetland conservation impacts and targets. Accordingly, the divide in preferences should be taken into account in policy-making, and the insights provided here may inform efforts to avoid conflict across the population. We examined the preferences for wetland conservation among urban and rural dwellers in Malaysia. A choice experiment using face-to-face interviews with urban and rural households was employed. Wetland conservation alternatives were described in terms of environmental protection zones, biodiversity protection, recreational services and flood. Each alternative was connected to a cost for the household, which was a reduction in subsidies for daily goods. Using a latent class model, we identified three groups with distinctly different preferences. The first group comprised mainly rural people with negative willingness to pay for conservation, while the second group included mostly urban people who favored wetland conservation and exhibited positive preference for wetland attributes. The third group was also consisted of mainly urban people who exhibited both negative and positive preferences toward different aspects of conservation. All three groups, however, asserted a strong preference for significant flood risk reduction. The results indicated potential conflicts over wetland conservation impacts and targets. Accordingly, the divide in preferences should be taken into account in policy-making, and the insights provided here may inform efforts to avoid conflict across the population.

International efforts to protect biodiversity depend on transnational collaboration and on public support for transnational policies to be implemented. Yet, we know little about what may compel citizens to support such transnational conservation efforts. In this paper, we design a lab-in-the-field experiment to explore how different framings and information about support shared across borders affect a citizen's conservation donations. Using a dictator game, we ask for donations from individuals in Denmark, Spain, and Ghana for the protection of natural habitats of the migratory Montagu's Harrier (Circus pygargus). We focus on citizens from Denmark, Spain and Ghana since these countries lie along the harrier's migratory route. We found that information affects donation behavior, albeit differently in each country. Our Danish and Ghanaian participants contributed more when (1) pre-donation information stressed that transnational collaboration is needed, and (2) they were told that a measure of their group's donation would be forwarded to other participants. In contrast, our Spanish participants donated less overall and were insensitive to the information treatments. The results document large differences across countries in supporting behavior in such transnational conservation settings and could influence how international conservation organizations organize and shape fundraising for their work.

We analyze housing markets in a suburb north of the Danish capital Copenhagen. There the concentration of affluent households decreases rapidly with distance to nature. This indicates systematic differences in preferences that are highly correlated with demographics. We assess if and to what extent this is the case by conducting a second-stage hedonic house price study, where we recover household-specific preferences for the availability of peri-urban nature. Preference parameters are identified locally through restrictions on household utility functions. We assess the relationship between demographic factors and household Willingness To Pay for nature availability across the Willingness To Pay distribution. The results of the analysis show that households paid on average 968 EUR per year for the level of peri-urban nature they have available from their home. In extreme cases, some households paid more than seven times the average amount. Willingness To Pay for peri-urban nature increases with income and wealth across the entire population. However, an increase in income will increase Willingness To Pay more for households at the lower end of the willingness to pay distribution, compared to the effect at the high end of the Willingness To Pay distribution. Furthermore, increases in education levels are related to higher willingness to pay in the middle of the willingness to pay distribution, whereas further education has less impact on households with high willingness to pay. Single parent status, car ownership, and other factors also affect Willingness To Pay for nature availability. Our study contributes to the discussion of the distributional aspects of environmental policies with results based on a revealed-preference method where households face a real and binding budget constraint. Our results show that the socio-economic distribution of changes in amenity values is a relevant factor to consider when evaluating policies that affect the provision of nature close to urban areas.

Coral reefs ecosystems fulfil important ecological functions, but risk degradation not only from climate change but also from increasing demands for the socioeconomic functions they also offer to local communities and international tourism. Coral reef diving tourism is a source of environmental pressure but at the same time represents a source of conservation funding, balancing these pressures. Tailoring the divers' experience to extract increased payments requires insights into the role of diving experiences for willingness to pay (WTP) for the access to dive in the waters surrounding Sipadan. We developed a choice experiment and applied it to a sample of 507 recreational scuba divers at the diving site Sipadan, Borneo in Malaysia. We investigated the role of divers’ most recent and overall diving experiences for their willingness to pay additional diving fees for features related to the conservation status and the diving operations. Results show that a majority of divers prefer lower litter pollution levels in the water and lower density of divers in each dive. When comparing the less experienced divers with the more experienced divers, the latter group express significant preferences over more of the marine biodiversity and recreational attributes of the diving experience. The less experienced group only tended to express significant preferences for fewer of these attributes. We also note that less experienced divers are more likely to have felt crowded and less likely to have seen pelagic species, suggesting, which may, in turn, explain their lower observed WTP.

The protected coral reefs off the coast of Malaysia receive numerous tourists, while also being as fishing grounds. These joint environmental pressures raise the need for additional costly conservation measures. It is natural to consider the potential for expanding the ‘user pays’ principle, already implemented in the form of various user fees. This study explores the potential for price discrimination among scuba divers at Sipadan in Malaysia. The study applies a choice experiment to estimate scuba divers willingness to pay higher user fees for avoiding decreases of or getting improvements in environmental and recreational aspects of the diving experience. We investigate how sensitivity to fee size and hence willingness to pay vary with suitable selected characteristics of divers. We find potentials for a third degree price discrimination strategy exploiting higher willingness to pay among foreign divers (45%), male divers (16%) and people who has visited Sipadan several times (25%). Thus, revised pricing structures could significantly increase funds for the preservation of Sipadan.

A number of methods exist for estimating the size of animal populations. All methods generate an uncertain estimate of population size, and have different properties, which can be taken into account when designing regulation. We consider hunting regulation when the population size is uncertain and when the self-reported bag is used to estimate the population size. The properties of a population tax and a tax on self-reported bag are analyzed and we begin by considering a baseline situation with full certainty and no use of self-reporting for population size estimation. Here individual hunters self-report a bag on zero and a population tax alone can secure an optimum. Next we show that when facing uncertain population size, a risk-averse hunter will self-report part of the bag to reduce the uncertain population tax payment, making both tax instruments necessary for reaching an optimum. Finally, when self-reported bag is used to estimate population size, we also show that it is optimal for hunters to report a part of the bag and both instruments are again necessary for reaching an optimum.

Peri-urban pressure on the Luki Biosphere Reserve in Bas-Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, is fuelled by growing demand in urban markets coupled with easy access. With data from 175 randomly selected households, this paper examines factors that motivate households to collect two major forest products found in the reserve for cash. We analyse the factors determining the choice of engaging in collection of bushmeat and eru (Gnetum africanum) and the factors determining the success (outcome) in collection using the Heckman selection model. This model explicitly separates estimation of selection into the activity from the outcome, to provide unbiased estimates of both. Results show that being local, higher household labour availability and higher asset endowment were positively related to selection into bushmeat hunting, reflecting higher risk-carrying capacities, ease of access to equipment and resources. Greater market distance being a female-headed household and greater age of household heads negatively affected selection into eru collection, reflecting characteristics of cash harvesting activities. Low education and more local knowledge characterised more successful outcome of eru collection, whereas having more household labour tended to lower outcomes of both bushmeat and eru collection suggesting that labour pools engaged in these activities were not sufficiently skilled, or that a higher proportion was consumed in such households. We discuss our findings in relation to the role of these activities in providing a pathway out of poverty and stress the needs for better integration of conservation and development policies.

Organic farming is based on the concept of working 'with nature' instead of against it; however, compared with conventional farming, organic farming reportedly has lower productivity. Ideally, the goal should be to narrow this yield gap. In this review, we specifically discuss the feasibility of new breeding techniques (NBTs) for rewilding, a process involving the reintroduction of properties from the wild relatives of crops, as a method to close the productivity gap. The most efficient methods of rewilding are based on modern biotechnology techniques, which have yet to be embraced by the organic farming movement. Thus, the question arises of whether the adoption of such methods is feasible, not only from a technological perspective, but also from conceptual, socioeconomic, ethical, and regulatory perspectives.

A key prerequisite to ensure that payment for ecosystem services is effective is that the management measures landowners are paid to undertake are in fact additional to the status quo and hence bring about a change in provision. We investigated Danish forest owners' preferences for conditional contracts for the provision of ecosystem services in Natura 2000 policies in a sample covering 12.5% of the total private forest area. This involves allowing old trees to decay naturally, setting aside forest areas, accepting a fixed percentage of broadleaves and increasing access for the public. Forest owners may already provide some of these, e.g., if they derive private benefits from them, in which case additionality becomes an issue. This study investigates the link between forest owners' current management and their willingness to accept (WTA) payments for providing specific ecosystem services by eliciting current practice prior to a choice experiment on contracts. For most of these ecosystem services, owners differentiate their WTA significantly according to their current management. Owners who did not provide extended access had a mean WTA of €14/ha/year for accepting access up to 15 m from roads and paths and €28/ha/year for accepting access everywhere in their forest. However, forest owners who already allow extended access have a mean WTA around zero.

We apply Bayesian updating theory to model how decision-makers may gradually learn about climate change and make use of this information in making adaptive forest management decisions. We develop modelling steps to i) simulate observation of a multi-dimensional climate system, ii) apply updating rules for beliefs about climate trends, iii) evaluate the performance of adaptive strategies, and iv) apply (i)–(iii) at the local and forest landscape scale to find and compare individual versus joint adaptive decisions. We search for optimal forest management decisions maximizing total biomass production as a measure of management performance. The results illustrate the benefits of updating beliefs to eventually utilize the positive effects and limit negative impacts of climate change on forest biomass production. We find that adaptive decision-making results in switching decisions over time and mostly differ from deterministic decisions ignoring any change in climate. Moreover, we find that the adaptation strategies are indispensable not only because of climate change but also because of the development of the forest biological system over time and the need to revisit decisions.

In Denmark, the right to hunt is vested with the land owner but can be transferred to others and is traded on a well-established market. The dominant form of hunting leases is time limited contract transferring the hunting rights on a piece of land to one or more persons. We analyze this market for hunting leases using the hedonic method on a rich set of data obtained from Danish hunters. We hypothesize and show that the price of a hunting lease reflects that hunting is a composite experience; and also reflects aspects relating to the landowners cost of leasing out hunting. Thus, the value of a lease is determined by the location and size of the hunting area, the game harvest and hunting activity itself, several landscape qualities affecting the recreational nature experience, several social aspects of hunting and the relation between the landowner, the hunters and their activities. The results can be used to make informed management and policy decisions that affect wildlife, hunters, landowners and land uses.

Sustainable agriculture in response to increasing demands for food depends on development of high-yielding crops with high nutritional value that require minimal intervention during growth. To date, the focus has been on changing plants by introducing genes that impart new properties, which the plants and their ancestors never possessed. By contrast, we suggest another potentially beneficial and perhaps less controversial strategy that modern plant biotechnology may adopt. This approach, which broadens earlier approaches to reverse breeding, aims to furnish crops with lost properties that their ancestors once possessed in order to tolerate adverse environmental conditions. What molecular techniques are available for implementing such rewilding? Are the strategies legally, socially, economically, and ethically feasible? These are the questions addressed in this review.

The proper balance between costly monitoring and non-compliance have often been studied, however, the costs of monitoring from landowners’ perspective have only received little attention. We designed a Choice Experiment where landowners expressed their willingness to accept afforestation contracts with varying attributes, one of them being the likelihood of being monitored. Based on agency and social preference theory, respectively, we formulated a model allowing us to test alternative hypotheses regarding landowners’ behaviour. The first hypothesis was that landowners may plan not to comply if optimal, which makes monitoring increasingly unwelcome as the contract sum increases. The second hypothesis was that landowners plan to comply and consider monitoring increasingly fair as the contract sum increases. The hypotheses were tested using a discrete mixture RPL model, where three parameters were estimated for an interaction effect between monitoring probability and contract sum (one fixed to zero and two varied freely). Both free parameters were positive and significant, indicating that landowners tend to find monitoring less of a negative feature, the higher the contract sum – suggesting that a group of landowners show social preferences. A latent class model further corroborated that conclusion.

Future climate development and its effects on forest ecosystems are not easily predicted or described in terms of standard probability concepts. Nevertheless, forest managers continuously make long-term decisions that will be subject to climate change impacts. The manager's assessment of possible developments and impacts and the related uncertainty will affect the combined decision on timing of final harvest and the choice of species for regeneration. We analyse harvest of a Norway spruce stand with the option to regenerate with Norway spruce or oak. We use simulated variations in biophysical risks to generate a set of alternative outcomes, investigating effects on decision making of three aspects of uncertainty: (i) the perceived time horizon before there will be certainty on outcome, (ii) the spread of impacts across the set of alternative outcomes, and (iii) the subjective probability (belief) assigned to each outcome. Results show that the later a forest manager expects to obtain certainty about climate change or the more skewed their belief distribution, the more will decisions be based on ex ante assessments — suggesting that if forest managers believe that climate change uncertainty will prevail for a longer period of time, they may make sub-optimal decisions ex ante.

We consider a hunting area and a wildlife reserve and answer the question: How does clever migration decision affect the social optimal and the private optimal hunting levels and population stocks? We analyze this in a model allowing for two-way migration between hunting and reserve areas, where the populations' migration decisions depend on both hunting pressure and relative population densities. In the social optimum a pure stress effect on the behavior of smart wildlife exists. This implies that the population level in the wildlife reserve tends to increase and the popu- lation level in the hunting area and hunting levels tend to decrease. On the other hand, the effect on stock tends to reduce the population in the wildlife reserve and increase the population in the hunting area and thereby also in- crease hunting. In the case of the private optimum, open-access is assumed and we find that the same qualitative results arise when comparing a situa- tion with and without stress effects, but of course at a higher level of hunting. We also show that when net social benefits of hunting dominate the net social benefits of populations, wildlife reserves are optimally placed in areas of low carrying capacity and vice versa.

Politics increasingly introduces initiatives supporting a shift toward a bioeconomy aiming at a society relying strongly on renewable biological sources while achieving economic growth efficiently and sustainably. However, the agenda of bioeconomy comprises different “shades of green,” in the sense that different actors stress different aspects of the concept, when embracing it in communication. This conceptual paper aims to present policy and socioeconomic theoretical frameworks and research areas relevant for a more holistic understanding of the bioeconomy concept applied to the forest sector, and identify a core set of potential contributions from social sciences for enhancing the bioeconomy in the forest sector. The paper focuses on studies within policy analysis, economics, and business administration disciplines. Thus it presents diverse disciplinary perspectives on the forest sector in a bioeconomy. Furthermore, innovation and sustainability have been identified as issues relevant to be approached across these disciplines. Politics increasingly introduces initiatives supporting a shift toward a bioeconomy aiming at a society relying strongly on renewable biological sources while achieving economic growth efficiently and sustainably. However, the agenda of bioeconomy comprises different “shades of green,” in the sense that different actors stress different aspects of the concept, when embracing it in communication. This conceptual paper aims to present policy and socioeconomic theoretical frameworks and research areas relevant for a more holistic understanding of the bioeconomy concept applied to the forest sector, and identify a core set of potential contributions from social sciences for enhancing the bioeconomy in the forest sector. The paper focuses on studies within policy analysis, economics, and business administration disciplines. Thus it presents diverse disciplinary perspectives on the forest sector in a bioeconomy. Furthermore, innovation and sustainability have been identified as issues relevant to be approached across these disciplines.