Analysis
The impact of academic information supply and familiarity on preferences for ecosystem services

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Abstract

Preferences elicitation can be a challenging exercise for citizens participating in assessment surveys. It is even more challenging when it comes to complex and unfamiliar ecosystems and the threatened ecosystem services they provide. Making people aware of the characteristics of the ecosystem services being valued is determinant for the assessment process. We investigated the impact of familiarity and academic information supply on people's preferences for twenty selected ecosystem services of French Mediterranean coastal lagoons. The results show that regardless of familiarity and information supply, there is a strong consensus about the highest importance of regulation and maintenance ecosystem services as well as environmental education and research opportunity ecosystem services. By contrast, nine of the cultural ecosystem services, together with two provisioning ecosystem services showed heterogeneous preferences among the different citizen groups. Using a combination of descriptive and inferential statistics these eleven ecosystem services split up into three clusters characterized as (i) contemplative leisure, (ii) heritage, and (iii) consumptive activities. Familiarity and academic information supply had a strong impact on the preferences for these three clusters of ecosystem services.

Introduction

Ecosystems are essential for human well-being. Therefore, understanding the link between ecological processes of ecosystems and human welfare is critical for a wide range of decision-making contexts (Fisher et al., 2009). Gathering information on complex ecosystem functioning and translating it into advantages society obtains from Nature has been widely carried out using the concept of ecosystem services (ESs) and through its economic valuation (see Costanza et al., 1997; Daily et al., 1997; Dendoncker et al., 2014; La Notte et al., 2015). ESs valuation includes assessing trade-offs among different options (e.g. ESs, ecological restoration projects, planning scenarios, etc.). Hence, in general, it is based on assigning relative importance to nature's diverse benefits to humans (Jacobs et al., 2016), and this process could facilitate more adequate conservation choices (Salles and Figuieres, 2013).

In ecosystem goods and services related valuation practices, there is an ongoing debate about the process on how to achieve the preference elicitation (e.g. Dendoncker et al., 2014; Kenter et al., 2015; Jacobs et al., 2016, Jacobs et al., 2018). So far, little is known on how existing valuation methods actually elicit the different values (Jacobs et al., 2018). In this area, increasing research attention is focused on the development of non-monetary valuation methods in favor of multi-criteria approaches allowing to better study the justification for compromises between objectives of efficiency, fairness and sustainability (Costanza, 2020). Preferences elicitation can be a challenging exercise for citizens involved in assessment surveys especially when it comes to complex and unfamiliar goods or services. For instance, nature services like water purification or climate regulation are generated by a complex interplay of natural cycles (Daily et al., 1997), which is often hardly understood by the majority of the citizens. Even many researchers, often highly specialized in their disciplines, may have difficulties in fully understanding the complex interplay. In Economics literature, the easiest-to-study situation is when individuals have preferences for goods and services with diverse characteristics about which they are well informed, and when their preferences are exogenous and reliable (O'Neill and Spash, 2000). This ideal situation is considered as the benchmark for which a standard kind of rationality is used, i.e., it has been postulated that individuals maximize their correctly understood self-interest and personal benefits (Yamagishi et al., 2014).

However, many findings show that respondents involved in preference elicitation surveys are often not familiar and often do not hold appropriate information on the ecosystem goods and services being assessed (Whitehead and Blomquist, 1991; Hanley and Munro, 1992; Spash and Hanley, 1995; Blomquist and Whitehead, 1998; Lewan and Söderqvist, 2002; LaRiviere et al., 2014; Brahic and Rambonilaza, 2015; Czajkowski et al., 2016; Ami et al., 2018; De Ville D'Avray, 2018). Realistically, some ESs are clearly perceived by people while others are not (De Groot et al., 2012). In contrast, we assume that at least part of the relevant knowledge emanates from the citizens themselves, i.e. from their experience and the familiarity they have acquired with the natural environment. Hence, not only indigenous people (Díaz et al., 2018), but also citizens in Western countries that are familiar with ecosystems have often acquired local knowledge that is complementary to the scientific knowledge. This may comprise both knowledge about their ecology, i.e. the local ecological knowledge (LEK) identified in ethnobiology (Narchi et al., 2014), and the knowledge of their benefits for society.

The citizens' preferences are based on perceptions, which sometimes hide a lack of knowledge about ecosystems and the services they provide. These perceptions could, nevertheless, change progressively as more information is provided. The external information that citizens often do not possess a priori (Costanza, 2004) can be acquired either through increased familiarity with the ecosystems, or from academic information, or from a combination of both. Citizens who live in the proximity of the focal ecosystem or regularly visit it during holidays become familiar, meaning that they are well acquainted with this ecosystem. Personal appreciations may be based either on affection alone or on a combination of affection with increased knowledge (Van Giesen et al., 2015). Depending on the individual, familiarity may result in increased affection for and cognitive knowledge of the ecosystem. In contrast, the supply of academic information only targets to increase the cognitive knowledge of the recipient citizens. For instance, Ami et al. (2018) reported that the impact of scientific information about the effects of air pollution on respondents' preferences, expressed as their willingness to pay (WTP) values, was strong. A proportion of people (30%) receiving scientific information revised their WTP upwards relative to the mean WTP value. Similarly, presenting survey participants with objective signal regarding the accuracy of their knowledge about a public good caused a significant increase in their preferences (i.e., their WTP) for it (LaRiviere et al., 2014). Also, Czajkowski et al. (2016) observed the effects of different information sets on subjects' preferences for a public good.

This study analyses the determinants of preferences for ESs of coastal lagoons related to the level and type of access to information. More precisely, the aim is to test the hypothesis according to which familiarity and academic information impact citizens' preferences for the relative importance of the different coastal lagoon ESs. This study of questions related to information strengthening the intrinsic motivations for ESs conservation allows us to integrate the issues of prioritizing measures of institutional, organizational and behavioral change. It is about studying the conditions of acceptance and the legitimacy of these changes following the logic of collective action and behavioral economics rather than public action based on financial incentives or technical measures. This represents a dynamic approach that emphasizes individual and collective learning within governance mechanisms and for which the role of perceptions and information is essential.

We used the Palavas lagoons' complex, which comprises seven coastal lagoons on the Mediterranean coast close to the city of Montpellier (South of France), as our case study. Coastal lagoons are shallow water bodies located at the continent-sea interface. They are permanently or temporarily connected to the sea through inlets and are subjected to a flow of fresh water from the watershed. In addition to supporting a rich flora and fauna, lagoon areas have always been of great interest to humans (Newton et al., 2014). For instance, they are often used for recreational and commercial activities such as amateur fishing, bird watching, professional fishing, shellfish farming, etc. In most cases, lagoon systems face anthropogenic stressors such as the destruction of ecological habitats along the coastline, the discharge of wastewater, chemical contaminants, overfishing, invasive species introduced by human activity, intensive aquaculture, climate change or tourism (Kennish et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2000).

To test the role of information on preferences, a survey was carried out among two types of populations: inhabitants near the Palavas lagoons complex and a panel of citizens at the national level living in non-coastal areas. In order to disentangle the impact of academic information and familiarity on preferences, we controlled as much as possible the factors of change between these populations (e.g. demographic characteristics). Preferences were elicited using non-monetary ESs assessment through the Majority Judgment approach borrowed from Social choice literature (Balinski and Laraki, 2010). We carried out an analysis combining descriptive statistics and an econometric model to test our hypothesis. Section 2 details the material and methods used. Sections 3 to 5 present, discuss, justify and conclude the main results.

Section snippets

Study area

The Palavas lagoons complex is located in the southern part of France bordering the Gulf of Lion in the Mediterranean Sea (see Fig. 1). In addition to the lagoons, the study site comprises also peripheral riparian zones such as wetlands, pasture and other natural areas. Palavas lagoons are representative of shallow lagoons (mean depth < 2 m) nearby an urban area, predominantly natural while used in the same time for recreational and fishing activities. Water quality in the lagoons had been

Coastal lagoon ESs: Homogenous versus heterogeneous preferences of ESs among groups of respondents

Table 7 lists the results of the Fisher's exact tests, which allowed us to identify whether the preferences for these different ESs were homogeneous among the four groups (ESs marked in italics, H0 retained, p > 0.05) or heterogeneous (ESs marked in bold, H0 rejected, p < 0.05). Eleven out of the twenty ESs presented heterogeneous preferences, and the remaining nine ESs presented homogeneous preferences. Interestingly, the latter included all five regulation and maintenance ESs as well as both

Discussion

This study focused on the role of information and familiarity in the individual preferences of ESs in Mediterranean coastal lagoons with the aim of assisting the design of public policies. Therefore, we studied how different variables impact the preferences of the respondents, using a logit multinomial model. We considered (i) the level of respondents' knowledge, i.e., whether they are informed and/or familiar or not, (ii) their behavior towards environment and (iii) their sociodemographic

Conclusion

In this study, we assumed that local populations are familiar with the focal ecosystem and that they possess knowledge about their ecology and benefits for society. The main results that emerged from our analysis show that there is a high interest for regulation and maintenance as well as environmental education and research opportunity services regardless of population type. By contrast, nine of the cultural ESs (CES) together with two provisioning ESs showed, however, heterogeneous

Supplementary data

Supplementary material

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

Acknowledgments

Mariam Maki Sy benefitted from a PhD fellowship from the DRIIHM LabEx (ANR-11-LABX-0010_DRIIHM), “Device for Interdisciplinary Research on human-environments Interactions” within the framework of the Human-environment observatory “Mediterranean coastline”. The authors thank the members of the former Syndicat Mixte des Etangs Littoraux (SIEL) for their support and advice during the data collection process. Mylène Farge and Nicole Lautrédou-Audouy are thanked for their help in organizing the

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