Willingness to pay for the conservation of the endangered Red-crowned Crane in China: Roles of conservation attitudes and income

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Highlights

  • Choice experiment is applied to elicit the willingness to pay for the conservation of the endangered Red-crowned Crane.

  • Respondents' marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the conservation outcome is higher than that for conservation measures.

  • Conservation attitudes have significantly positive correlation with individual's MWTP for conservation outcome.

  • Family income has significantly positive correlation with individual's MWTP for conservation measures.

  • Policy intervention design needs to consider whether targeting for increasing public's conservation awareness or income.

Abstract

This study uses a choice experiment design to elicit the public's willingness to pay (WTP) for the highly endangered Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis) in Yancheng National Wetland Nature Reserve (YNWNR) in coastal China. It particularly analyzes the extent to which marginal WTP (MWTP) is influenced by conservation attitudes and income. Using a dataset collected from 262 respondents from Beijing through an intercept survey administered in 2014 and focusing on conservation outcome and measures as attributes, we find that mean MWTP for a 10% increase in the share of Crane population wintering in YNWNR in global population, a 10% increase in natural wetland habitat area in YNWNR, and 10% reduction in pesticide use on adjacent farmland are RMB 35, 29, and 14, respectively. The study further finds that conservation attitudes have a positively significant correlation with respondents' MWTP for the conservation outcome, while family income is significantly and positively correlated with their MWTP for the conservation measure such as increasing in natural wetlands in the Reserve. This implies that awareness promotion programs designed to increase the public's conservation awareness may only be effective to increase the public's WTP conservation programs with clearly targeted conservation outcomes while programs designed to increase income might be conducive to increase the public's willingness to pay for conservation measures. Thus, policy interventions designed to increase the public's support for conservation need to consider whether they target for increasing public's awareness or their income.

Introduction

The rapid loss of global wetlands presents a challenge for global biodiversity conservation. About one third of global wetlands had been lost as of 2009 (Hu et al., 2017). About 2.65 million km2 of wetlands has been lost in Asia (Hu et al., 2017). In China, about 3.40 × 104 km2 of wetlands, an area larger than the total size of Belgium, were lost during the period of 2003–2013 (State of Forestry Administration, 2014). Given the importance of wetlands for biodiversity (Hails, 1997), urgent action is needed to halt the rapid loss of global wetlands. Globally, designating protected areas such as wetland nature reserves2 has been a widely used approach to reducing species loss and habitat loss (Runge et al., 2015). Nonetheless, conservation in wetland nature reserves, like in other types of protected areas, is facing threats from agricultural and urban expansion, climate change, conflicts with local communities and lack of funding (Gong et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2019; Zheng et al., 2010).

Decision-makers are increasingly required to provide economic justification for investing in conservation, and a good understanding of the public's willingness to pay (WTP) for the environment or management alternatives is essential for such justification (Faccioli et al., 2020; Han et al., 2010). This is especially true with the increasing number of endangered species worldwide coupled with increasing management costs (Han et al., 2010). In existing literature, meta-analyses and non-market valuation methods have been used to obtain people's WTP for endangered species (e.g. Layton and Levine, 2005; Lew and Wallmo, 2011; Loomis and White, 1996; Zander et al., 2014). Regarding factors influencing WTP for species conservation, literature has shown that changes in the size of species population, types of species, payment frequency and characteristics of respondents are important factors (Loomis and White, 1996; Richardson and Loomis, 2009). Moreover, as WTP for conservation is derived from preferences and choice set, which is subject to income constraint, income is a major determinant for WTP for conservation. The significance of income for WTP for conservation has been supported by numerous empirical studies (e.g. Bowker and Stoll, 1988; Du et al., 2010; Kotchen and Reiling, 2000; Pang et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2009; Zong et al., 2008). Furthermore, people's motivations, attitudes, perceptions or beliefs are also important factors influencing WTP as these may affect people's preferences and values (McFadden, 2001). This has been demonstrated by an increasing number of empirical research (e.g. Choi and Fielding, 2013; Faccioli et al., 2020; Halkos and Halkos and Matsiori, 2018; Kotchen and Reiling, 2000). Among the above influencing factors, income for WTP reflects the economic motives behind WTP while public's attitudes reflect the non-economic motives behind willingness to support for conservation (Liordos et al., 2017; Martín-López et al., 2007). The information about attitudes toward conservation is useful to policy decisions (Streever et al., 1998) and difference in social and environmental attitudes can also help to analyze heterogeneity in preferences in the non-market valuation studies (Bartczak, 2014).

Despite the importance of understanding people's underlying motives for promoting ecological policies (Bartczak, 2014), existing empirical studies in China have mainly concentrated on demonstrating the importance of income for WTP (e.g. Du et al., 2010; Pang et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2009; Zong et al., 2008), but paying little attention to the extent to which public's attitudes toward conservation may affect WTP for protected endangered species. This study is therefore conducted to elicit the public's WTP for the conservation of a globally endangered species, the Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis), in a coastal wetland nature reserve in China. It particularly focuses on analyzing the extent to which WTP is influenced by conservation attitudes and income.

Considering the advantages of choice experiment (CE) over contingent valuation method (CVM) to elicit the marginal values of protecting endangered species (Hanley et al., 1998), this study applies the attribute-based CE method to elicit the public's WTP for the conservation of the Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis). Specifically, existing studies show that attributes on policy measures to remove threats to species can influence individual's expected utility differently compared to attributes on policy outcomes (Bulte et al., 2005; Johnston and Duke, 2007). It is recommended that policy makers learn from the values placed on the outcomes and the preferred measures to achieve the outcome (Rogers et al., 2013). Thus, the CE design of this study includes conservation outcome and conservation measures as separate attributes. Unlike CVM design, CE design enables us to study respondents' MWTP for conservation outcome and conservation measures simultaneously to provide recommendations that are tailored for conservation outcome and conservation measures. This study also contributes to a rather small database of valuation studies on biodiversity conservation in China, where CVM has been used as a primary method to elicit WTP for wetland or species conservation (Chen et al., 2006; Pang et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2009; Zong et al., 2008).

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the study area and the Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis). Section 3 reports the research design. Section 4 introduces the econometric models and Section 5 presents the results. Section 6 concludes with discussion and explains policy implications of this study.

Section snippets

The study area and the Red-crowned Crane

Yancheng National Wetland Nature Reserve (YNWNR, 32°34′–34°28′ N, 119°48′–120°56E’), covering a total area of 2472.6 km2 in Jiangsu Province in coastal China (Fig. 1), is chosen as our study area, due to its international importance for biodiversity conservation and representativeness for many other wetland nature reserves facing similar situations in China. It was established in 1983, accepted as a member of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Man and

Research design

To design CE for this study, we focus on preserving both the species and their habitat as the design attributes (Dissanayake and Ando, 2014). The first step in CE study was to define attributes and their levels, and the second step was to create choice sets based on the defined attributes and their varying levels.

Econometric models

The theoretical foundation of CE is the random utility theory (RUT) (McFadden, 1986; McFadden and Train, 2000). Under the RUT framework, there is a latent utility function that cannot be observed by researchers. RUT further assumes that the latent utility function includes both an explainable and an unexplainable (random) component. We represent the latent utility of respondent i choosing choice alternative j at an occasion t in the following form:Uijt=Vijt+εijtwhere Uij is decomposed into a

Description of the sample

Table 2 presents the sample information for the respondents in our sample. More than half (53%) of the respondents are male. They are 41 years old on average and have obtained an average education of 13 years (a person with a high school education would have 12 years of education). About 65% of the respondents are permanent residents registered in Beijing. Their average family size is about 3 persons and their annual family income is RMB 119,200 yuan (equivalent to US$18,480). Since the

Discussions and conclusions

The study follows an increasing trend in moving economic valuation techniques from scientific forums to management practices in the design of systems that pay landowners for ecosystem services (Bennett et al., 2018; Martín-López et al., 2007). As few studies have attempted to estimate the public's WTP for different management strategies though with exceptions (e.g. Han et al., 2010), this study uses CE design to elicit Beijing residents' preferences for alternative conservation programs to be

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China [Project No. 18VSJ100], National Natural Science Foundation of China [Project No. 41571519 and Project No. 71773135], and National key technology supporting program by Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2012BAC01B01). We owe our gratitude to Professor Nick Hanley, Professor Zhou Jinbo, Dr. Gao Jun, and Dr. Ding Hui for their generous support. We appreciate the help and research assistance from Ms. Zhang Xuyun, Mr.

Author statement

All authors have read and agree to the published version of the manuscript. The authors contributed equally to this work. Yazhen Gong: Survey and investigation, data curation, methodology, formal analysis, validation, visualization, original draft preparation, revising and editing; Xiang Bi: methodology, modelling, software, validation, Writing, Reviewing and Editing; Jian Wu: Conceptualization, Resource, Survey and investigation, Analysis and Writing, Reviewing and Editing, Project

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