Are citizens willing to accept changes in public lighting for biodiversity conservation?

Chloé Beaudet, Léa Tardieu and Maia David

Ecological Economics, 2022, vol. 200, issue C

Abstract: Light pollution has significantly increased in recent years, in concert with urban sprawl. Light pollution consequences for nocturnal wildlife, human health, and energy consumption are numerous but are poorly tackled in urban policies. The regulation and mitigation of light pollution is possible, but requires an important shift in the lighting paradigm, including in public lighting often managed by local authorities. One of the main sources of reticence of local authorities to regulate light pollution is the potential rejection by citizens of lighting changes. In this article, we investigate citizens’ willingness to accept the transition to more sustainable lighting regimes. We use a discrete choice experiment in a large French metropolis to measure the relative weight of different characteristics of public lighting – light intensity, light extinction, light colour – in respondents’ decisions. We show that respondents are globally open to public lighting shifts, but their preferences in terms of the changes are highly heterogeneous. By incorporating socioeconomic variables of respondents into our econometric models, we characterise the main profiles of preferences regarding lighting changes. This provides practical information to urban and environmental planners allowing them to match the municipalities where the need for light pollution control is a priority with those where measures seem socially acceptable by citizens.

Keywords: Light pollution; Social acceptability; Discrete choice experiment (DCE); Latent class model; Sustainable lighting; Dark ecological corridor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922001896
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:200:y:2022:i:c:s0921800922001896

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107527

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 ().