Abstract
Adequate demand for, and recognition of, forest carbon services is critical to success of market mechanisms for forestry-based conservation and climate change mitigation. National and voluntary carbon-offsetting schemes are emerging as alternatives to international compliance markets. We developed a choice experiment to explore determinants of local forest carbon-offset valuation. A total of 963 citizens from Guadalajara in Mexico were asked to consider a purchase of voluntary offsets from the neighbouring Biosphere Reserve of La Primavera and from two alternative more distant locations: La Michilía in the state of Durango and El Cielo in Tamaulipas. Surveys were applied in market stall sessions and online using two different sampling methods: the snowball technique and via a market research company. The local La Primavera site attracted higher participation and valuation than the more distant sites. However, groups particularly interested in climate change mitigation or cost may accept cost-efficient options in the distant sites. Mean implicit carbon prices obtained ranged from $6.79 to $15.67/tCO2eq depending on the surveying methodology and profile of respondents. Survey application mode can significantly affect outcome of the experiment. Values from the market stall sessions were higher than those from the snowball and market research samples obtained online; this may be linked to greater cooperation associated with personal interaction and collective action. In agreement with the literature, we found that valuation of forest carbon offsets is associated with cognitive, ethical, behavioural, geographical and economic factors.
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Notes
There were 67 protests and confused respondents in the market stall sample (20 %), 78 in the snowball (16 %), and 19 in the market research sample (12 %).
The percentage of the population focused on location, carbon or cost refers to the percentage of complete questionnaires (Table 5).
As mentioned in the previous section the groups focused on carbon and cost may give up a project in La Primavera if cost-efficient options are not available locally, as shown by the negative signs for La Primavera in rows 9 and 10 in Table 3. We use the valuation figures from the group focused on location only as proxy for the local benefits of La Primavera.
These figures can be computed as (La Primavera–La Michilía)/Carbon.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Georgina Espinosa, Sebastián Gradilla, Francisco Talavera, Ivette Flores, Rodolfo Aceves, Sara Torres, Renata Romo, Ricardo Ontiveros, Adolfo Macías, Álvaro Ochoa, Primrose Lovett, Luis N., Omar A., Paola Agredano, Rocío González, Juan P. Gutiérrez, Lydia Hernández, the executive office of La Primavera and also the people from Guadalajara for their collaboration. We also thank Jim Smart, Enrico de Minin, Klaus Hubacek, the participants on the session on PES during the ISEE 2010 conference in Oldenburg and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. The research was funded by the Darwin Initiative (Project: 17027 to JCL and ABT); Arturo Balderas Torres acknowledges scholarships granted by CONACYT and SEP.
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Balderas Torres, A., MacMillan, D.C., Skutsch, M. et al. The valuation of forest carbon services by Mexican citizens: the case of Guadalajara city and La Primavera biosphere reserve. Reg Environ Change 13, 661–680 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-012-0336-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-012-0336-z