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Measuring Rural Home Owners’ Willingness to Pay for Land Conservation Easements - Seong-Hoon Cho,David H. Newman and J. M. Bowker
Published: 1/9/2005
2004 Southeast Watershed Roundtable Presentaion Click here for full agenda
The rapid growth of rural communities in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Macon County, North Carolina, interfacing with unprecedented growth of metropolitan Atlanta has been giving rise to concerns over declining environmental quality and increasing need for land use policy. This paper examines willingness to pay (WTP) for hypothetical conservation easements as an alternative land use policy for the county. To assess WTP for the conservation easements of Macon County, we designed a self-administered, mail-back questionnaire to characterize home owners and their properties. We identified characteristics of home owners regarding WTP for the conservation easements. It is confirmed that newer home owners and home owners with higher income of rural, urban-fringe communities place relatively greater conservation value. We also learned that conservation value increases as home owners’ properties are closer to the area related to the specific environmental amenities. In addition, it is found that second home owners tend to be more supportive about the proposed conservation easements than primary home owners. Despite the fact that Macon County struggles to adopt any land use policy, the revealed WTP for conservation easements of our study shows home owners’ support for conservation easements. The estimated WTP ranges between $15.29 and $23.18 per year per household with and without protest zero bids, respectively. The total WTP would conserve between 154 to 234 acres of farmland per year and would reduce the rate of farmland developed from 1987-1997 by roughly 40-60% in the next 10 years, should the county choose to adopt the conservation easements.
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