Evaluating the public's preferences toward sustainable planning under climate and land use change in forest parks

Abstract

Balancing the goals of sustainable planning under climate and land use change (CLUC) with ecosystem service functions is a huge challenge for the management and programming of protected areas today. We construct a new evaluation framework towards the perspectives of sustainable land management based on the choice experiment (CE) model, and apply it to investigate the public's preferences for the forest parks in Taiwan. This study found that implementing organic farming, increasing species populations, increasing the acreage of secondary forest area, and developing an integrated framework for ecotourism would best satisfy the public's preferences for sustainable land use management. Second, we identify that the heterogeneity of the public's preferences for forest park management varies depending on whether individuals are (1) members of environmental groups, (2) agricultural landowners, and (3) residents of the municipality. Third, we find integrated land use programs generate the highest welfare values among scenarios comprising different financial attributes.