Conference Agenda

We use a choice experiment to elicit preferences from experts, a representative sample of the UK public and practitioners in the financial sector over different key concepts/metrics of biodiversity; richness, genetic distinctiveness, extinction risk, intactness, habitat, population. The experiment eschews a monetary attribute and problematic estimation of willingness to pay for biodiversity. Rather, elicited preferences are used to determine the appropriate metric in a target-cost-based approach to biodiversity pricing (akin to abatement cost carbon-pricing), as recently proposed in the UK and France. The results show clear similarities across groups: strong preferences for lower extinction risk and higher species richness and practically indifference towards intactness measures. An England-wide evaluation of site selection under different biodiversity metrics reveals the potential for large welfare benefits when organising biodiversity policy around public and expert preferences compared to metrics commonly used in biodiversity crediting, financial disclosures, and biodiversity policy implementation, such as intactness. Even without WTP measures, gauging public preferences on biodiversity allows policies to deliver biodiversity improvements that people actually value.

Despite the increasing availability of remote sensing and socio-economic data, rigorous assessments of the values of the ecosystem services forests in developing countries provide remain scarce. By using rigorous impact evaluation and valuation techniques and data from India, we generate spatially explicit marginal values for six forest ecosystem services—the mitigation of environmental diseases acute respiratory infections, caused by polluted air, and mosquito-borne malaria, the mitigation of flood damages, carbon storage and sequestration, and the provision of fuelwood and clean water. We use a variety of non-market valuation methods: damage costs, benefit transfers, travel cost, and a market-based approach to quantify the spatially explicit marginal values of forests. We then examine trade-offs and complementarities between the six ecosystem services and, overlaying various institutional and biophysical factors, suggest how our analysis can be used to guide future forest conservation efforts in India.

The global oceans provide essential services to humans. To inform policymakers and the public about their health, the Ocean Health Index (OHI) tracks and aggregates performance across ten key indicators, using a simple arithmetic mean. This aggregation implies that all policy goals are equally important and, crucially, perfectly substitute each other. We test these key normative assumptions empirically, conducting a large-scale online experiment with more than 2,000 participants from 6 major coastal countries. Our findings reject the current aggregation assumptions of the OHI: A majority of respondents consider the OHI goals to be complements instead of perfect substitutes, and we find a large heterogeneity in the perceived importance of individual goals. Using preference-adjusted scores we illustrate that both country scores and relative rankings often change profoundly. Overall, our re-assessment reveals a less healthy global human-ocean system than currently portrayed by the OHI.

In Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, incentive payments conditional on zero deforestation do not always match the time profile of landowners' opportunity costs. In this study, we examine the impact of adding some flexibility to PES contracts to allow landowners the possibility of receiving part of the financial incentive if some deforestation is detected during the contract period. We ran a pilot PES program in the Brazilian Amazon during the last years of Jair Bolsonaro's mandate, at a time when incentives to deforest were strong. Using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, we implemented a PES procurement auction to elicit landowners' reservation prices for forest conservation. We embedded the BDM auction in a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which included one control group and two PES treatment groups of about 150 voluntary landowners each. In line with theoretical predictions, we found that, while the flexible PES contract allowing some deforestation saved slightly more forest, the fixed payment contract requiring zero deforestation exhibited a higher benefit-cost ratio when considering payments only. However, when implementation costs are also taken into account, the flexible contract becomes more cost-effective.