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Benefit transfer with limited data: An application to recreational fishing losses from surface mining
Citation:
Mazzotta, M., L. Wainger, S. Silfleet, J. Petty, AND B. Rashleigh. Benefit transfer with limited data: An application to recreational fishing losses from surface mining. ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, (119):384-398, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
Several environmental issues are associated with mountaintop mining and valley fills, and regional policy-makers and environmental managers are interested in quantifying the effects of mining on ecosystem services, in order to support environmental decision making associated with this activity. This analysis estimates the potential lost welfare for one ecosystem service, recreational fishing, using a benefit transfer method that is scale-appropriate and sensitive to local conditions. This method can be used in other areas experiencing impacts from mountaintop mining.
Description:
The challenges of applying benefit transfer models to policy sites are often underestimated. Analysts commonly need to estimate site-specific effects for areas that lack data on the number of people who use the resource, intensity of use, and other relevant variables. Yet, the benefit transfer literature has focused on the estimation of transfer functions, including out of sample transferability and other methodological and model robustness issues, while methods for overcoming data gaps are often ad-hoc and untested, despite the fact that results can be highly sensitive to these poorly constrained variables. Here, we address issues that arise when applying transfer functions to policy sites that have sparse or missing data. We present options for estimating the data needed to apply meta-regression models (MRMs) in ways that are scale-appropriate and sensitive to local conditions. We use a case study of estimating the potential lost welfare to freshwater anglers as a result of mountain top and surface coal mining within West Virginia in the Appalachian region of the U.S. Our study area encompasses most of the area in West Virginia where mountaintop removal-valley fill mining occurs.Three models are integrated to relate surface mining impacts to changes in social welfare: 1) an empirical ecological model of fish community changes; 2) an MRM that relates changes in catch rates to changes in anglers’ utility; and 3) a spatial participation analysis that combines multiple survey datasets to map trip distribution. We estimate results under two scenarios of partial (20%) and full use of existing mine permits and apply varying assumptions about anglers. Using the conservative assumptions of median county income and mean catch rates, we estimate an annual welfare loss due to changes in freshwater fish abundance of $87,300 for the partial mining scenario and $469,600 for the full mining scenario, due to changes in recreational fishing catches. These results are sensitive to catch rate assumptions and socio-demographic characteristics that varied widely depending on the spatial scale of measurement. This estimate of lost welfare only begins to capture the ecosystem service effects of mining since recreational fishing is only one use of the area’s impacted streams.
