The high seas provide a variety of ecosystem services that benefit society. There have, however, been few attempts to quantify the human welfare impacts of changes to the delivery of these benefits. We assessed the values of several key ecosystem service benefits derived from protecting ecosystems in the high seas of the Flemish Cap through choice experiments conducted in Canada, Norway, and Scotland. Rather than solely eliciting public willingness to pay, we also explored the determinants of variance in the estimates of willingness to pay. We aimed to determine how much respondents were willing to pay for high-seas ecosystems conservation, which factors influence individuals’ willingness to pay, and whether individuals in Canada had a higher willingness to pay relative to those living in Norway and Scotland. This latter point captures distance-decay effects. On average, the public placed positive value on conserving high-seas ecosystems and on developing economic activities related to the exploitation and exploration of marine resources, despite a lack of awareness and familiarity with these environments. Distance-decay effects on willingness to pay were not clear. Scots had the highest willingness to pay and the Norwegians the lowest willingness to pay for all attributes, with the only exception being willingness to pay for a large increase in new jobs, in which case Canadians’ willingness to pay was higher than Scots’. The public's willingness to pay was influenced by sociodemographic characteristics and their perceptions of high-seas ecosystems. Our results provide evidence of the impacts of high-seas governance on human welfare and that improved governance could increase the value people place on high-seas ecosystems and the services they produce.

中文翻译：

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重视公海生态系统保护

公海提供各种造福社会的生态系统服务。然而，很少有人尝试量化这些福利交付的变化对人类福利的影响。我们通过在加拿大、挪威和苏格兰进行的选择实验，评估了保护佛兰芒帽公海生态系统所带来的几个关键生态系统服务效益的价值。我们不仅探索了公众的支付意愿，还探讨了支付意愿估计中方差的决定因素。我们旨在确定受访者愿意为公海生态系统保护支付多少费用，哪些因素会影响个人的支付意愿，以及与居住在挪威和苏格兰的人相比，加拿大人的支付意愿是否更高。后一点捕捉距离衰减效应。平均而言，公众对保护公海生态系统和发展与海洋资源开发和勘探有关的经济活动给予了积极的重视，尽管对这些环境缺乏认识和熟悉。距离衰减对支付意愿的影响尚不清楚。苏格兰人对所有属性的支付意愿最高，而挪威人的支付意愿最低，唯一的例外是愿意为大量增加的新工作支付费用，在这种情况下，加拿大人的支付意愿高于苏格兰人。公众的支付意愿受到社会人口特征及其对公海生态系统看法的影响。