Private landowners’ preferences for trading forest landscape and recreational values: A choice experiment application in Kuusamo, Finland

Liisa Tyrväinen, Erkki Mäntymaa, Artti Juutinen, Mikko Kurttila and Ville Ovaskainen

Land Use Policy, 2021, vol. 107, issue C

Abstract: Although nature-based tourism is increasingly recognized in forest strategies, economic incentives for private landowners supporting the production of amenity values are largely lacking. This study focused on possibilities to enhance the scenic and recreational values of private forests for nature-based tourism in Finland. More specifically, we studied forest owners’ attitudes towards – and willingness to participate in – a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiative called Landscape and Recreation Value Trade. We also investigated the acceptability of forest management alternatives sustaining landscape qualities, the relative importance of different features of Landscape and Recreation Value Trade for landowners, and the magnitude of overall compensation claims of alternative Landscape and Recreation Value Trade models. A choice experiment survey was conducted in Kuusamo, a popular nature-based tourism destination, located in northeastern Finland. The results show that several forest owners were interested in the suggested scheme if economic losses were to be compensated. The landowners’ preferences for Landscape and Recreation Value Trade were somewhat heterogeneous, suggesting that private forest owners in Kuusamo have rather diverse motivations and objectives for their ownership. Owners who stated to have scenic landscapes on their land, and those living outside Kuusamo area, were more willing to join in the suggested mechanism. In general, landowners’ willingness to participate was strongly dependent on the amount of compensation as well as on other terms of the contract, such as the duration and severity of harvesting restrictions. The largest marginal compensation claims were related to long contract durations and the stringent “no harvesting at all” restriction. Given the heterogeneity in landowners’ preferences, a Landscape and Recreation Value Trade model, offering flexibility to join the system, is needed to attract landowners of forests in hotspot locations for tourism that would help in designing a cost-efficient model for practical application.

Keywords: Choice experiment; Nature-based tourism; Payments for ecosystem services; Private forests; Willingness to accept compensation; Random parameters logit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q23 Q26 Q51 Z38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719305307
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:lauspo:v:107:y:2021:i:c:s0264837719305307

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104478

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().