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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 10th Sept 2026, 07:07:12pm CEST (Norway)

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Daily Overview

Session

Choice modeling for environmental policy
Location: Auditorium K
Session Chair: Noelle Lasseur, Wageningen University

Presentation 4

Testing the Impact of Urbanization on Public Preferences for Circular Nature-based Solutions

Noelle Lasseur^1,2, Roy Brouwer^2,3, Kirsty Holstead¹, Dave Huitema¹

1: Department of Public Administration and Policy, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; 2: Department of Environmental Economics, Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 3: Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Discussant: Yanying Wang (Peking University)

The central question of this study revolves around the impact of urbanization on public preferences for Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) that involve the recycling of water, referred to here as Circular NBS, or CNBS. Circularity can involve the recovery of water through the reuse of (treated) wastewater, which can raise public concerns. Understanding preferences for CNBS and how different degrees of urbanization shape these preferences is essential for informing sustainable urban development and fostering socially acceptable solutions. This is studied here through a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) involving over 2,000 respondents divided across different urbanization categories, following the Eurostat degree of urbanization methodology. In testing our main hypothesis of a positive but diminishing demand for CNBS along the urban-rural gradient, we apply both the ‘external’ urbanization classification and an ‘internal’ metric in the DCE measuring geographic proximity to the CNBS. This paper makes three key contributions to the literature. First, we confirm our main hypothesis, that there is significant demand for CNBS across all urbanization categories, with a significantly decreasing income elasticity of WTP as the level of urbanization increases, highlighting a stronger demand for CNBS in higher urbanized contexts. Secondly, we nevertheless find strong indications of a Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) effect across all urbanization categories that quickly wears off and converts into a non-linear distance-decay function. Finally, the degree of urbanization significantly influences preferences for different local wastewater reuse options, with a stronger demand for reuse in urban parks in highly urbanized areas, and for reuse in agricultural applications in rural areas.