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A Synthesis of the Economic Values of Wilderness
Abstract and Figures
Early applications of wilderness economic research demonstrated that the values of natural amenities and commodities produced from natural areas could be measured in commensurate terms. To the surprise of many, the economic values of wilderness protection often exceeded the potential commercial values that might result from resource extraction. Here, the concepts and tools used in the economic analysis of wilderness are described, and the wilderness economic literature is reviewed with a focus on understanding trends in use, value, and economic impacts. Although our review suggests that each of these factors is trending upward, variations in research methods plus large gaps in the literature limit understanding of long-run trends. However, as new data on wilderness use, visitor origins, and spatially referenced features of landscapes are becoming increasingly available, more robust economic analysis of both onsite and offsite wilderness economic values and impacts is now becoming possible.
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... U.S. states are also recognizing these trends-since 2011, sixteen states have established government outdoor recreation offices to measure the contribution of outdoor recreation to the state economy, promote outdoor tourism, and provide economic development assistance to rural communities that is related to outdoor recreation (Walls 2018). Finally, in a review of estimates of the value of wilderness areas, Holmes et al. (2016) show that, as predicted by Krutilla, estimated use and nonuse values of wilderness appear to be growing over time. ...
... re governed by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and Forest Service lands by the National Forest Management Act, both passed in 1976. 6The averages are based on a 106 million-acre NWPS at the time of the review; the system is now more than 111 million acres (see https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/fast-facts/default.php).Holmes et al. (2016) also synthesize the literature on values of wilderness, with a focus on how values have increased over time. ...
The 129 national monuments in the United States protect cultural and historic resources while giving people access to remote and wild landscapes. Particularly in the West, national monuments have garnered support from conservationists, members of Congress, and the general public But these vast swaths of deserts and mountains have also seen their fair share of opposition from those who believe that the land should be used for resource development. This review article covers the history of national monument designations in the U.S., reviews the evidence on social benefits and costs of protected lands and economic impacts of monuments, and offers observations about rising public lands conflicts in the future.
... For instance, the U.S. Forest Service has moved to a RES approach of conceptualizing and measuring supply and demand for recreational opportunities (Sills et al., 2017). As noted by Holmes et al. (2016), applying a RES approach to public land management helps managers better integrate recreation management with other forms of land management: ...
Increased visitor use and overuse are well-documented in popular national parks in the Western United States. Previous research has documented how this high level of visitor use negatively impacts park resources and inhibits the provisioning of recreational ecosystem services to park visitors. This research informs the man- agement of recreational ecosystem services in wildland protected areas by identifying important provisioning areas, degraded provisioning areas, and at-risk pro- visioning areas through a participatory mapping exercise conducted with park managers and other key residential stakeholders (e.g., tourism operators, NGOs, and local community leaders) in Grand Canyon National Park. Following a mixed methods design, responses were analyzed via overlap, hotspot, and qualitative metadata analyses. Findings indicate that unique bundles of recreational ecosystem services are provisioned in specific areas across the study area. However, many of these service provisioning areas were also found to be either degraded or at-risk of degradation due to visitor use trends. Based on perceived service provisioning and degradation, areas of concern for recreational ecosystem service management were subsequently classified. Finally, sources and impacts of degradation for areas of concern were identified through a paired qualitative analysis of the spatial participatory mapping data. As a result, this manuscript outlines a new method of prioritizing areas for recreational ecosystem service management through an areas of concern analysis that examines the overlap of service provisioning areas and ecological and experiential degradation.
... Conservation decision makers seeking to make optimal use of limited land management funds are often tasked not only with facilitating hunter participation but also with spurring rural economic development through hunter expenditures. Many assessments of hunter expenditures while traveling for and engaging in hunting have demonstrated that hunter expenditures on food, fuel, lodging, and equipment can have a significant economic impact on rural economies (Arnett & Southwick, 2015;Bilgic, Florkowski, Yoder, & Schreiner, 2008;Grado, Hunt, Hutt, Santos, & Kaminski, 2011;Holmes et al., 2015;Munn, Hussain, Spurlock, & Henderson, 2010). Because of the potential for hunter expenditures to contribute to rural economic development, strategies for optimizing hunter expenditures have been the subject of much discussion (e.g., Burger, Miller, & Southwick, 1999;Wallace, Stribling, & Clonts, 1991). ...
The recreational and economic benefits of hunting on traditional permanent public lands are well-established. Increasingly popular “open fields” hunting access programs temporarily open private lands to public hunting through public-private partnerships. Open fields programs have the potential to create public hunting opportunities and economic development in rural communities, but the extent to which open fields programs compare to traditional public lands at providing benefits to hunters and rural communities has not yet been evaluated. We compared hunter use and expenditures on open fields lands and traditional public lands in Nebraska, USA. We used Convolution Likelihood Ecological Abundance Regression, a novel Bayesian abundance estimation method, to predict hunter effort, target species, and total expenditures using combined inferences from hunter count surveys, camera traps, and extensive in-person interviews. Open fields sites generally provided lower hunter use and expenditure returns per unit area than did traditional public lands. However, open fields and traditional public lands provided similar returns in one study region prioritized for highly-publicized upland gamebird opportunities. Our findings demonstrate that open fields programs can create returns in use and hunter expenditures when paired with strategic communication initiatives and further suggest that access programs may benefit from enrolling properties that provide diverse opportunities.
Management implications
The study shows, that public access hunting lands near urban areas receive relatively high use, but hunter expenditures may be greater in ecological rich rural areas. Public-private hunting access partnerships can create returns in hunter use and expenditures when they provide access to valued, highly-publicized hunting opportunities.
... Their positive relationship with sound level is therefore of particular interest. It would appear that this might be the result of an emerging phenomenon concerning designated Wilderness and national parks: wilderness amenity migration (Holmes et al., 2015). This form of amenity migration, broadly defined as the "the movement of people based on the draw of natural and/or cultural amenities" (Gosnell & Abrams, 2011, p. 303), is specific to public lands and protected areas (Locke, 2006;Rasker, Alexander, van den Noort, & Carter, 2004). ...
... The literature on economic valuation of environmental and natural resources that captures non-market values is extensive. However, most work centres on forest valuation as whole rather than on individual species (see Barrio and Loureiro, 2010;Holmes et al., 2015). The economic valuations of particular species that have been conducted rarely focus on plant species (see Loomis and White, 1996;Richardson and Loomis, 2009). ...
The whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) tree species faces precipitously declining populations in many locations. It is a keystone species found primarily in high-elevation forests across the Western US. The species is an early responder to climate change and qualifies for endangered species protection. We use contingent valuation to estimate the public's willingness to pay for management of the whitebark pine species. In contrast, previous work centres on valuing broader aspects of forest ecosystems or threats to multiple tree species. While only approximately half of the survey respondents have seen whitebark pine, the mean willingness to pay for whitebark pine management is $135 per household. When aggregated across all households from the three sampled states, willingness to pay totals $163 million. This information is valuable to forest managers who must make difficult decisions in times of resource constraints and climate change.
The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing is in close proximity to or intermingled with wildland vegetation, is widespread throughout the United States, but it is unclear how this type of housing development affects public lands. We used a national dataset to examine WUI distribution and growth (1990–2010) in proximity to National Forests and created a typology to characterize each National Forest’s combination of WUI area and housing growth. We found that National Forests are hotspots for WUI growth, with a 38% increase in WUI area and 46% growth in WUI houses from 1990 to 2010, in excess of WUI growth for the conterminous U.S. Growth within National Forests was higher than the surrounding area. Diffuse intermix WUI, where houses are intermingled with wildland vegetation, is common within National Forests, but WUI houses around National Forests were primarily in denser interface WUI areas, which lack substantial wildland vegetation. WUI was more prevalent within and around National Forests in the East, while National Forests in the West experienced higher rates of WUI growth. National Forests with the most challenging WUI issues—extensive WUI area and rapid growth in intermix and interface—were found primarily in the South and interior West. Given the diversity of WUI landscapes, effectively responding to current and future WUI challenges will require both engagement with individual homeowners dispersed throughout National Forests, as well as increased emphasis on mitigating denser interface development around National Forests. At a time when wildfire risks are expected to intensify due to climate change, and 75% of privately owned land within and around National Forests is not yet WUI, understanding WUI growth patterns in proximity to public lands is vital for land management and human well-being.
Conservation scientists recognize that additional protected areas are needed to maintain biological diversity and ecological processes. As regional conservation planners embark on recommending additional areas for protection in formal conservation reserves, it is important to evaluate candidate lands for their role in building a resilient protected areas system of the future. Here, we evaluate North Carolina’s Mountain Treasures with respect to their (i) ecological integrity, (ii) role in connecting existing core protected areas, (iii) potential to diversify the ecosystem representation of reserves, and (iv) role in maintaining hotspots of biologically-rich areas not well protected. Mountain Treasures represent a citizen inventory of roadless areas and serve as candidates for elevated levels of conservation protection on U.S. federal lands. We compared Mountain Treasures to other candidate lands throughout the country to evaluate their potential national significance. While the Mountain Treasures tended to be more impacted by human modifications than other roadless areas, they are as important as other roadless areas with respect to their role in connecting existing protected areas and diversifying representation of ecosystems in conservation reserves. However, Mountain Treasures tended to have a much higher biodiversity priority index than other roadless areas leading to an overall higher composite score compared to other roadless areas. Our analysis serves as an example of how using broad-scale datasets can help conservation planners assess the national significance of local areas.
The Rainy River Watershed on the Superior National Forest is home to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). It also contains deposits of copper, nickel, and trace metals, and copper-nickel mining has been proposed adjacent to and upstream of the BWCAW. In 2017, the US Department of Agriculture proposed withdrawing land in the Rainy River Watershed within the Superior National Forest from mineral leasing, a position it reversed in 2018. These developments highlight the potential tradeoff between economic benefits from mining and concerns about its negative economic consequences for the local recreational and amenity-based economy. Previous studies of mining in the Superior National Forest focus on static effects on a single industry (e.g., mining) at some unspecified point over a medium-run horizon. We draw on these studies and the economics literature to provide a unified analysis of the effect of the proposed mining development on income and employment over time. Our results suggest that the proposed mining would lead to a boom-bust cycle that is typical of resource extraction economies, exacerbated by the likely negative effect on the recreation industry.
National monuments in the United States are protected lands that contain historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest. Their designations are often contentious. Opponents argue that monuments hurt local economies by limiting uses of public lands, while supporters counter that monuments create a new amenity-driven economy. We use panel data on all business establishments in the eight-state Mountain West region to estimate economic impacts of 14 monument designations over a 25-year period. We find that monuments increased the average number of establishments and jobs in areas near monuments; increased the average establishment growth rate; had no effect, positive or negative, on the number of jobs in establishments that existed pre-designation; and had no effect on mining and other industries that use public lands. On net, protecting lands as national monuments has been more help than hindrance to local economies in the American West.
Economic values from the protection of natural environments such as wilderness, can be grouped into eight categories: recreation, community, passive use, scientific, biodiversity, off-site, ecological services, and education. This article reviews what is known about these values. While monetary values can be calcu- lated for only a few of the benefit categories and only some of the benefits within those categories, the estimated benefits amount to U.S. $3 to 4 billion dollars annually.
This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of nonmarket valuation. The chapter first develops a model of individual choice where private goods are freely chosen but environmental goods are rationed from the individual’s perspective. The model is used to define compensating and equivalent welfare measures for changes in prices and environmental goods. These welfare measures form the basis of the environmental values researchers seek to measure through nonmarket valuation. The chapter discusses the travel cost model with and without weak complementarity, the household production model, the hedonic model, and the general concept of passive-use value. The individual choice model is extended to a dynamic framework and separately to choice under uncertainty. Finally the chapter develops welfare measures associated with averting expenditures and random utility models.
Comparisons of empirical estimates of the values of wildlife, wilderness, and general recreation require that the values are based on comparable methodologies and comparable units of measurements. Adjustments necessary to allow such comparisons are outlined and are applied to an extensive data base of valuation studies. -Authors
Prior to the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964, economics as a science was hardly considered applicable to the types of human values set forth in this pathbreaking legislation. Economics was largely confined to the purchasing and labor decisions of households and firms as well the functioning of markets and economies. However, around this time, John Krutilla (1967) in his seminal paper entitled “Conservation Reconsidered” recognized the economic importance of benefits from nature that were not traded or valued by conventional markets. During the next 50 years, economists developed theoretical and methodological tools that allowed economic values, or dollar metrics, to be estimated for wilderness and other protected nature. In this article, we review the conceptual basis for an economic understanding of wilderness benefits and values. This review is followed by a brief summary of empirical studies about economic values of wilderness. We then use this information to derive rudimentary dollar metrics for the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Shows that nonuse demands of resident Colorado households increase at a decreasing rate with added designation. An empirical procedure was adopted to explore the effects of a large number of socioeconomic and preference variables on willingness to pay for preservation values. The results provide an empirical test and confirmation of the proposals by Weisbrod and Krutilla that the general population may be willing to pay for the preservation of unique natural environments and that their option, existence, and bequest values should be added to the consumer surplus of recreation use to determine the total economic value of wilderness to society.-from Authors