Investigating societal preferences and values for water and biodiversity protection
☀︎ With the overall aim of revealing the well-being impacts of policy action or inaction, we provide research on societal preferences and values for environmental changes and policy scenarios.
☀︎ Our research provides knowledge and qualitative, quantitative and monetary evidence on:
- welfare costs and benefits related to environmental change;
- factors affecting individuals’ behaviour and reasons for their willingness to pay for environmental changes;
- societal preferences and values for policy scenarios, creating environmental changes.
☀︎ We conduct primary research, using economic valuation methods, such as market prices, travel cost, contingent valuation and choice modelling, and apply economic valuation evidence, using value transfer.
☀︎ Our research also provides diverse non-monetary evidence, including on society’s connection with and knowledge about the environment, motivations and preferences for environmental changes and policy actions.
☀︎ We have extensive experience in conducting the valuation studies, particularly in relation to the water environments and marine ecosystem services.
☀︎ Our work as part of national and international research projects allows us developing novel approaches and new knowledge on the societal preferences and values for water and biodiversity protection and the well-being implications of policy action or inaction.
Examples of our work in this area (please see the section of our Projects and Publications for more information)
- Involvement in the Baltic Sea region assessment of welfare costs (foregone benefits) due to degradation of the marine environment (applying the value transfer approach) as part of the HELCOM BLUES project.
- A national valuation study (applying the choice experiment method) on the societal benefits and costs linked to changes in state of marine ecosystem services from designating new Marine Protected Areas in the Latvian marine waters as part of the project “Improving knowledge on state of the marine environment”.
- A national valuation study (applying the contingent valuation method) on the welfare benefits of achieving good status of the Latvian marine waters as part of the project “Improving knowledge on state of the marine environment”.
- A joint valuation study in Finland, Germany and Latvia (applying the participatory-GIS, travel costs, contingent behaviour and choice experiment methods) on the benefits of marine-related recreation and the welfare impacts of changes in the quality of marine environment and ecosystem services as part of the BONUS BalticAPP project.