River water quality: Who cares, how much and why?

Hampson, Danyel, Ferrini, Silvia, Rigby, Dan and Bateman, Ian (2017) River water quality: Who cares, how much and why? Water, 9 (8). ISSN 2073-4441

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Abstract

An important motivation for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive is the creation of non-market environmental benefits, such as improved ecological quality, or greater opportunities for open-access river recreation via microbial pollution remediation. Pollution sources impacting on ecological or recreational water quality may be uncorrelated, but non-market benefits arising from riverine improvements are typically conflated within benefit valuation studies. Using stated preference choice experiments embedded within a survey that also collected respondents’ socio-economic characteristics, we aimed to disaggregate these sources of value for different river users, thereby allowing decision makers to understand the consequences of adopting alternative investment strategies. Our results suggested that anglers derived greater value from improvements to the ecological quality of river water, in contrast to swimmers and rowers, for whom greater value is gained from improvements to recreational quality. More generally, we found three distinct groups of respondents: a majority preferring ecological over recreational improvements, a substantial minority holding opposing preference orderings, and a yet smaller proportion expressing relatively low values for either form of river quality enhancement. As such, this research demonstrates that the non-market benefits that may accrue from different types of water quality improvements are nuanced in terms of their potential beneficiaries and, by inference, their overall value and policy implications.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	water framework directive,ecological and microbiological water quality,choice experiment,willingness to pay for river water quality,conditional logit,latent class analysis,non-market benefits
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Resources, Sustainability and Governance (former - to 2018) Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Social Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Collaborative Centre for Sustainable Use of the Seas
Related URLs:	http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/9/8/621
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	02 Sep 2017 05:07
Last Modified:	31 Jan 2024 02:16
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64728
DOI:	10.3390/w9080621

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