THEME 2. CHANGING ROLES OF BIODIVERSITY IN THE LANDSCAPE

Analysis of the Willingness to Pay for Protecting Lake Danao National Park in Ormoc, Leyte, Philippines

by Canesio D. Predo¹ and Nicomedes D. Briones² and Herminia A. Francisco³

The study was conducted to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for preservation benefits of protecting the environmental attributes of Lake Danao National Park (LDNP) in Ormoc, Leyte, Philippines. This was implemented using the Contingent Valuation Method. (CVM) with three willingness to pay question formats: open-ended, payment card, and iterative bidding. A total of 210 respondents were interviewed from urban and rural categories. Factors affecting WTP bid for protecting LDNP were identified and analyzed using the Tobit (censored regression) model. The environmental attributes of LDNP considered in deriving total WTP are forest quality, wilderness/biodiversity, and lake quality.

Results showed that all respondents were aware about LDNP as a recreation site in Ormoc City. Forest quality was most preferred among urban respondents, whereas lake quality was considered more important to rural respondents. Urban and rural respondents attached equal importance to biodiversity as an environmental attribute. There were 91% of the respondents who expressed WTP for a protection program to preserve the environmental attributes of LDNP. The mean annual total WTP for LDNP's environmental attributes protection was estimated to be P121.70 for urban respondents and P93.09 for rural respondents, or P108.45 for the total respondents. For all the households in Ormoc, the total social WTP was estimated to be P2.62 million annually. This value reflects maximum amount that Ormoc residents are willing to invest to preserve LDNP.

Willingness to pay for various motives of protection (recreation use, option, existence, and bequest) was derived in the study. Of these various motives, the last three (collectively termed as preservation value) received the highest allocation (77% to 91%) of total WTP. Recreation demand was significantly influenced by years of education, household size, household annual income, number of visits per year to LDNP, number of days spent on places other than forest, willingness to pay for an entrance fee, environmental attributes preferred, organization membership, and household location. The factors that significantly affected preservation demand are age, education, household annual income, sex, forest visitation rate, willingness to pay for an entrance fee, and the concern of the respondents towards environmental protection.

Footnote_______________

¹ Graduate Student (Ph. D. in Agricultural Economics), University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), And Faculty, Visayas State College of Agriculture, Baybay, Leyte, Philippines

² Associate Professor, School of Environmental Science of Management, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines

³ Associate Professor, Department of Economics, College of Economics and Management, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines