Transfer of choice model benefits: a case study of stream mitigation

Abstract

Development activities place pressures on the natural environment that are very costly to avoid or remedy. In these cases, off-site mitigation may be used to address the effects of development. A choice model is applied to two different communities within a large metropolitan area to identify the values people place on stream attributes and to identify the types and scale of mitigation necessary to offset environmental damages. Tests of benefit transfer between the two communities identify significant, unexplainable differences in values for the same environmental changes. Pooled model tests were able to identify differences that could not be detected using overlapping confidence interval tests or value-difference tests with independently estimated models.