Factors Affecting Conservation Easement Acceptance

Author : Lukas R. Todd
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781369234367
Total Pages : 74 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (343 download)

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Download or read book Factors and Prices Affecting Colorado and Wyoming Landowners' Willingness to Accept a Conservation Easement written by Lukas R. Todd and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a result of in-migration, and exurban development in the Rocky Mountain west, prices for rural agricultural land have been increasing. Rural landowners are incentivized to sell or develop their land, thus fragmenting open space. Open space provides many public goods such as biodiversity, ecosystem services, scenic vistas, and various recreational opportunities. Much of the remaining open space in the continental U.S. occurs on rural agricultural land. Conservation easements (CEs) are one way to protect that privately-held open space, but the market for CEs is not well understood because CE contracts are primarily negotiated privately between land trusts and landowners. The objective of this research is to investigate what factors influence a landowner’s decision to choose a CE and the welfare benefits that a landowner gains by placing an easement on a parcel of their land. We use data gathered from the Wyoming and Colorado Landowner Survey. A random utility multinomial logit model estimates the probabilities of a landowner choosing an easement based on the attributes of the easement, and landowner. Welfare estimates, and associated confidence intervals, for the landowners’ willingness to accept were then calculated using the Krinsky and Robb procedure. Results show that landowners prefer CEs in perpetuity and that do not require public access. Landowners with a higher sense of place and community are more likely to choose an easement. We estimate that the total mean welfare benefit gained by a landowner is worth $55,217.30 per parcel of land. Our results also indicate that moving to a limited term easement (20 years) or requiring public access to the property reduces benefits by 30 or 58% respectively. Conversely, if a landowner scores one pointer higher on a scale of 1–80 on their sense of community-attachment, their welfare increases by 1.2%. These results provide important information about landowners, their preferences for CEs, and how they value different aspects of CEs that could impact transaction costs for land trusts, and public agencies conserving private lands.