Exploring social attitude and willingness to pay for water resources conservation

Abstract

This research advances the understanding of people's attitude towards water resources valuation. Specifically, it aims to improve confidence in the interpretation of people's willingness to pay (WTP) for water resources protection by enhancing understanding of value relationships. Primary data were obtained from a sample of 510 people living in and visiting the Pinios River in the eastern part of central Greece. Respondents' behaviour was explored by measuring and comparing use and non-use values with the help of a proposed constructed scale for measuring the dimensions of total economic value of a water resource. For this purpose, a combination of applied methodological research techniques like principal component and cluster analyses together with logistic regression was used. The results indicated the relative importance of particular value components in determining water resources conservation preferences, as well as individuals' WTP for protecting them. We have extracted four factors and explored their influence on respondents' WTP and the general attitude towards the area. There were high associations between WTP of individuals towards river protection in relation to their characteristics (like education, income and origin). (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.