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200 environmental valuation
environmental damage from tourism. These are in
turn enabling consistent decisions to be made on
the extent, feasibility, desirability and technical
standards that should apply to the rehabilitation of
damage, and this can only assist local acceptance of
the desirability of tourism development in the
future.
See also: environmental auditing; pollution
management; quality, environmental
Further reading
Malone, P. �1991) `Pollution prevention through
waste minimisation: converging the interests of
industry, government and the public, environment
and planning', Law Journal 267. �Describes
the move away from end of pipe waste
minimisation regulatory approaches.)
MALCOLM COOPER, AUSTRALIA
environmental standards see environmental
auditing
environmental stewardship see
environmental management, best practice
environmental valuation
Environmental and natural resource economics has
developed a whole group of methods designed to
place value on environmental attributes and which
could be applied to the valuation of non-priced
tourism resources. The main methods that have
been developed can be classified by differentiating
those that produce monetary valuation directly �by
asking respondents their willingness to pay for an
improvement or to avoid a degradation) from those
that provide the valuation indirectly �by using
prices from a related market which does exist).
Contingent valuation is an example of the
former, while the travel cost and hedonic pricing
are representative of the latter.
Contingent valuation is a method that uses
direct questioning of individuals to show a potential
market and generate estimations of compensating
variation for a change in individual welfare with
respect to the supply level of environmental
goods. This method enables economic values to
be estimated for a wide range of commodities not
traded in markets, such as national parks,
forestry characteristics, wildlife, saltwater beaches,
recreational fishing, air visibility, water quality,
ecotourism destinations and tourism congestion.
The travel cost method, which can claim to be
the oldest of the non-market valuation techniques,
is predominantly used in outdoor recreation
modelling, with fishing, hunting, boating, bird
watching, camping and natural area visits among
the most popular applications. The method takes
advantage of the fact that each individual who
visits a natural area faces a trip cost, entry fees,
onsite expenditures and outlay on capital equipment
necessary to enjoy the services that the host
areas provide. The responses of individuals to
variations in the implicit price of the visit are the
basis for estimating the value of a recreational
service.
Hedonic pricing identifies environment service
flows as elements of a vector of characteristics
describing a marketed good �typically housing), to
find a relationship between the level of environmental
services and the prices of marketed goods.
The method has been used to value such things as
noise levels around an airport, effects of the
proximity of environmental facilities on residential
property price, amenity values of woodland, price
competitiveness of package tours and environmental
impact of tourism.
See also: ecologically sustainable tourism;
impact assessment, environmental
Further reading
Mitchell, R.C and Carson, R.T. �1989) Using Surveys
to Value Public Goods:The Contingent Valuation
Method, Washington, DC: Resources for the
Future.
Sinclair M.T. and Stabler, M. �1997) The Economics
of Tourism, London: Routledge.
Smith, V.K. �1996) Estimating Economic Values for
Nature:Methods for Non-Market Valuation, Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar.
ANTONI RIERA, SPAIN