Greenbelts in the Cornbelt: Riparian Wetlands, Intrinsic Values, and Market Failure

C L Lant and R S Roberts
Additional contact information
C L Lant: Department of Geography, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL 62901-4514, USA
R S Roberts: Department of Geography, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA

Environment and Planning A, 1990, vol. 22, issue 10, 1375-1388

Abstract: Historical agricultural practices have severely undermined the recreational quality and ecological integrity of Midwestern streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Reestablishing riparian forest corridors would create wetland buffers partially protecting water quality and aquatic ecosystems from agricultural runoff. On the basis of an explicitly spatial market-failure model of land use in the riparian (floodplain) zone, contingent valuation survey methods are used to estimate the recreational and intrinsic benefits of improved ‘river quality’ in selected Iowa and Illinois river basins. It is found that willingness to pay for river quality is related to income and recreational participation, but not to other spatial or socioeconomic variables. Intrinsic values are found to be expressible as economic values similar to that of other public goods. Together with recreational values, they are larger on a per-acre basis, in many instances, than the production of agricultural commodities. This suggests that the purpose of programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program should be enlarged from their present focus on soil conservation to include water quality, aquatic ecosystems, and intrinsic values.

Date: 1990
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a221375 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:22:y:1990:i:10:p:1375-1388

DOI: 10.1068/a221375

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().