Forest management plays an important role in mitigating the most serious threats to the well-being of current and future generations: climate change and biodiversity loss. We examine citizens’ preferences for alternative forest management policy goals, including the provision of carbon sinks, biodiversity, and forest sector jobs, using a discrete choice experiment in Finland. We explore preference heterogeneity using latent class multinomial logit models finding the highest willingness to pay for biodiversity-oriented forest policy. Comparing three forest policy scenarios, focusing on “Biodiversity,” “Climate,” or “Bioeconomy,” citizens preferred the overall environmental goals over economic ones. We observe considerable heterogeneity in respondents’ preferences identifying five latent preference classes. The results provide valuable background information on citizens’ values and preferences on tradeoffs built into future revisions of forest policy.
Is it More Important to Increase Carbon Sequestration, Biodiversity or Jobs? A Case Study of Citizens’ Preferences for Forest Policy in Finland
Year: 2023
