Contingent valuation of ecosystem health

Ecosystem health values represent compressed information about the status or condition of an ecosystem. The valuation process reduces multidimensional information about ecosystems to an assessment endpoint or metric. This paper utilizes a money metric to estimate the total value and existence value of ecosystem health protection for the high-elevation spruce-fir forests in the southern Appalachian Mountains. A survey instrument was developed using the contingent valuation method to elicit willingness to pay values from a random sample of the public. Utilizing a bootstrap hypothesis testing procedure (Efron & Tibshirani 1993), the results indicate that existence values are an important and empirically distinct component of total ecosystem value. ©1996 Blackwell Science, Inc.

Duke Scholars

Author Randall Kramer Environmental Sciences and Policy