Our interactions with wildlife and use of the outdoors can be quantified and, in some cases, this is useful to help demonstrate some of the economic value the outdoors has for us when arguments are made for the impacts and benefits of the outdoors.
Additionally, outdoor areas, such as national parks and recreational grounds, that have built infrastructure to support our enjoyment, have a given cost that has to be paid for. Knowing what those costs and benefits are of these built resources are important for park managers so they can better manage their expenses while demonstrating the return that managed outdoor areas provide.
Over the last twenty years, various tools have been created to help estimate the economic benefits of recreational or wildlife areas. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) created a tool, called Benefits Transfer Toolkit (no longer available), to help determine the economic value of public managed lands.
This toolkit, when it was active between 2014 to 2017, helped to estimate the economic impact of these lands by looking at how users of lands spend in accessing given areas as well as how much people spend on surrounding facilities. The tool was based on various studies, most of which were published prior to 2014, on ecosystem services and their economic impact to given regions.
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For instance, areas in the southeast United States provided the most economic impact out of all regions in the United States for backpackers, excluding Alaska, when calculating on a per capita basis. In this case, it was estimated that each person spent about $42.37 in the southeast United States prior to 2014. This toolkit was developed using regression and Bayesian analyses to derive these estimates.[1]
The value of National Parks in the United States
When it comes to providing data to Congress and government organizations that help fund and maintain national parks, economic impact and estimates are an important way to argue for the value of national parks in the United States.
Economic value of watching bears in Alaska
The economic benefits of bear viewing from each person at Katmai National Park have been calculated (using 2017 dollar value) to be around $287/day. The park is remote and requires considerable expense just to travel to, particularly coming from the lower 48 states (the analysis excluded foreign travel).
Users of the park feel viewing bears, where the park has some of the highest concentrations of brown bears particularly during seasons when salmon are swimming upstream, is a unique experience and are generally happy to spend to view the bears. A single-site individual travel cost model is used to estimate expenses people are willing to make to travel to the national park.
Calculating the economic value of bear watching
Travel costs and benefits of viewing bears were determined using a modified utility function. This function considered the value people place on viewing and photographing bears, as well as expenses for guides, education level, and other related costs.
From this, researchers can determine not only how much people are willing to spend during their viewing days at Katmai, but also identify factors like education and income level that influence who is likely to visit the park.
The study used 169 observations that show households making $137,000 or more per year with mostly bachelor level or more education constitute the majority of viewers at the park. This demonstrates a remote park like Katmai in Alaska generally attracts more wealthy and well educated households, but those households are willing to spend extra given their interest and value they put in viewing bears.[2]
More recently, the National Park Service (NPS) has been using an interactive tool, called NPS Visitor Spending Effects, to demonstrate expenses from visitors across states and national parks. The tool provides national impact of national parks, in dollar value, as well as more state-level impact. Between 2012 and 2022, national parks helped to bring in $14.7 billion to $23.9 billion per year.
California has benefitted the most from National Park use.
Overall, the tools shows there has been an almost billion dollars of growth per year in terms of dollars spent on national parks. California has benefited the most from National Park use, with over $2.7 billion spent as of 2022.
Alaska gets the highest per person benefit, with $1.2 billion spent in the state translating to about $1635/person for the state in terms of how much individuals benefit in the state’s economy. This uses the IMPLAN software to model estimates of direct and secondary spending in states. The IMPLAN (Impact Analysis for Planning) model is a widely used economic input-output model designed to estimate the economic impact of various activities and policies.
The model incorporates multipliers in spending on food, accommodation, and travel based on total visitor numbers.[3]
Factoring non-economic benefits into wildlife economic analyses
Economic analyses of wildlife are not just about the dollar or market benefit of wildlife. It also looks at behavior choices such as how people look at risk and its influence on their protective actions against wildlife.
In a research review analyzing economic analyses of wildlife conservation, recent approaches to valuing nature have incorporated shared, social and cultural values into valuations that attempt to aid decision-making.
Trade-offs in wildlife conservation
Choice experiments and hypothetical scenarios are given to respondents in surveys in areas of interest and conservation. Trade-offs between conservation measures and recreational policies affecting wildlife interactions, such as hunting, are calculated to determine policies that attempt to balance interests. The results are then used to determine optimal values for number of hunting days in a region or used to calculate areas that could be exempt from hunting restrictions.
More recent methods attempt to incorporate aspects that include ideas beyond individualism and practical benefits. Transcendental values are now often included to account for cultural, social, and non-economic benefits in wildlife analysis. Beliefs and social norms about conservation actions, for instance, have shaped how people make pro-environmental choices.
Wildlife areas that help people achieve life goals, allow one to live in harmony with the environment, and make healthy and equitable choices for individuals and others are also increasingly valued as part of evaluation systems.[4]
Using both economic and non-monetary valuations to drive conservation policy
Economic valuations have been one way in which conservation and land management benefits have been used to demonstrate overall benefit wildlife and the outdoors create. They are also used to drive policy and management decisions in land managed by government agencies. Although these valuations can be about monetary benefit, they also increasingly incorporate non-monetary benefits, including benefits to cultural values that engage the public. Nevertheless, numeric values help to put a tangible benefit that can be used to shape policy and help conserve wildlife in different regions.
References
[1] For more on the Benefit Transfer Toolkit, see: Quay, B., Huber, C., and Meldrum, J. Benefit Transfer Toolkit.
[2] For more on the study looking at bear viewing at Katmai National Park, see: Richardson, Leslie, Christopher Huber, and John Loomis. 2017. “Challenges and Solutions for Applying the Travel Cost Demand Model to Geographically Remote Visitor Destinations: A Case Study of Bear Viewing at Katmai National Park and Preserve.” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 22 (6): 550–63. DOI: 10.1080/10871209.2017.1369196.
[3] More on the NPS Visitor Spending Effects tool.
[4] For more on a review on how economic valuations of wildlife and recreation areas have been considered, see: Martino, Simone, and Jasper O. Kenter. 2023. “Economic Valuation of Wildlife Conservation.” European Journal of Wildlife Research 69 (2): 32. DOI: 10.1007/s10344-023-01658-2.
Fonte : National Geographic
