Financial Value of Nature: Coastal Housing Markets, Mangroves, and Climate Resilience

Teng Liu, Brook Constantz, Galina Hale and Michael Beck

No 34329, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Measuring the financial value of nature is difficult, often resulting in insufficient funding directed to nature conservation and restoration. As coastal risks increase from development and climate change, a tangible benefit of nature is the protection it offers against storm damages. Many studies from the risk industry and others assess the direct effects of wetlands for reducing damage during storms. However, the value of wetlands for coastal protection could extend to many other benefits, including home prices in areas where storms are common. We use property-level housing transaction data from Zillow and show that proximity to mangroves in Florida moderates home price decline and dispersion following major hurricanes. The effects are substantial in magnitude, reducing the probability of losing a quarter or more of housing value by 2-7 percentage points, which corresponds to 20-40-thousand-dollar value for a million-dollar property, conditional on a hurricane.

JEL-codes: G12 Q54 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
Note: AP EEE PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34329.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34329

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34329
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().