Trade-offs involving land use change, cultural values, water resources and jobs are critically important to understand the opportunity cost of resource extraction. Stated preference techniques can be particularly useful in eliciting the non-market values expressed as trade-offs. This study assesses preferences over the management of groundwater released from deep mining operations in Western Australia. A discrete choice experiment is used to investigate the trade-offs Australians are prepared to make for remote economic, ecological and cultural goods against costs. The results suggest that there is heterogeneity of preferences as indicated by a three-class structure of a latent class model. One class supports the use of released groundwater across a range of economic, ecological and cultural uses modelled: extending town water supply, restoring rangeland habitat, creating jobs for Aboriginal Australians and preserving cultural waterholes. The smallest class supports all these uses except job creation and the final class only supports preserving cultural waterholes. These results illustrate public attitudes towards cultural values as well as wider environmental policy tensions between instrumental and intrinsic values.

中文翻译：

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文化价值、深部采矿作业以及将剩余地下水用于城镇、景观和工作

涉及土地利用变化、文化价值、水资源和就业的权衡对于了解资源开采的机会成本至关重要。陈述偏好技术在引出表示为权衡的非市场价值方面可能特别有用。本研究评估了对西澳大利亚深部采矿作业释放的地下水管理的偏好。一项离散选择实验用于调查澳大利亚人准备为偏远的经济、生态和文化产品与成本进行权衡。结果表明，潜在类模型的三类结构表明存在偏好的异质性。一类支持在一系列经济、生态和文化用途中使用释放的地下水，建模：扩大城镇供水，恢复牧场栖息地，为澳大利亚原住民创造就业机会并保护文化水坑。最小的一类支持除创造就业外的所有这些用途，最后一类只支持保护文化水坑。这些结果说明了公众对文化价值的态度以及工具性价值和内在价值之间更广泛的环境政策张力。