A Spatially Accurate Method for Evaluating Distributional Effects of Ecosystem Services

Aliza Fleischer (), Daniel Felsenstein and Michal Lichter

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 145, issue C, 451-460

Abstract: The value of most ecosystem services invariably slips through national accounts. Even when these values are estimated, they are allocated without any particular spatial referencing. Little is known about the spatial and distributional effects arising from changes in ecosystem service provision. This paper estimates spatial equity in ecosystem services provision using a dedicated data disaggregation algorithm that allocates ‘synthetic’ socio-economic attributes to households and with accurate geo-referencing. A GIS-based automated procedure is operationalized for three different ecosystems in Israel. A nonlinear function relates household location to each ecosystem: beaches, urban parks and national parks. Benefit measures are derived by modeling household consumer surplus as a function of socio-economic attributes and distance from the ecosystem. These aggregate measures are spatially disaggregated to households. Results show that restraining access to beaches causes a greater reduction in welfare than restraining access to a park. Progressively, high income households lose relatively more in welfare terms than in low income households from such action. This outcome is reversed when distributional outcomes are measured in terms of housing price classes. Policy implications of these findings relate to implications for housing policies that attempt to use new development to generate social heterogeneity in locations proximate to ecosystem services.

Keywords: Ecosystem services; Equity; Welfare distribution; Synthetic spatial micro-data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917305736
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: A spatially accurate method for evaluating distributional effects of ecosystem services (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:145:y:2018:i:c:p:451-460

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.11.019

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().