Contingent Valuation of Forest Ecosystem Protection

In recent decades, concerns have arisen about the proper valuation of the world’s forests. While some of these concerns have to do with market distortions for timber products or inadequate data on non-timber forest products, an additional challenge is to uncover the economic worth of nonmarket services provided by forest ecosystems (Kramer et al. 1997). This has led to a growing number of publications addressing the valuation of forest ecosystem services, on topics such as carbon sequestration and endangered species habitat. In this chapter, we focus on the contingent valuation method (CVM) to assess the structure, health, and extent of forest ecosystems.’ Forest ecosystems generate a wide variety of use values, the most important of which are timber, non-timber products, recreation, wildlife habitat, and watershed services. While use values are important, and their provision was the primary objective of public land management in the past, increasingly public land managers are confronted with demands arising from passive use values such as the knowledge that specific ecosystems exist or will be available for future generations to enjoy. Although use and passive use values are both non-market, passive use values can only be measured using stated preference methods. Researchers use one of two stated preference methods, CVM and Attribute Based Method (ABM), to uncover non-market values of forest quality. ABMs represent a merging of the hedonic method in economics that views the demand for goods as derived from the demand for attributes, with marketing research methods for determining perceived values of particular product features. Values are revealed through a series of questions that ask people to rate, rank, or choose among a set of alternatives with varying levels of each attribute. ABMs have been used in recent years for valuing