Non-market value of Estonian seminatural grasslands: a contingent valuation study.

Seminatural grasslands i.e. the floodplain meadows, seashore meadows, wooded meadows, dry meadows, wooded pastures are the very traditional part of Estonian landscapes, which play an important role in the appearance of the landscape in general and also serve as an important habitat for many plant and animal species.
In order to preserve the seminatural grasslands continuous annual mowing and/or pasturing is needed. This activity is not economically profitable and needs subsidizing.
The authors of the work raise a hypothesis that the Estonian seminatural grasslands could be viewed as a valuable non-market environmental good for which a significant public demand exists. In order to find out the non-market value of the seminatural grasslands a contingent valuation study was carried out among the Estonian working-age population (size of the sample 1061 individuals). The average individual willingness to pay was 11.3 euros. During the study, the authors constructed the total demand function and discovered that the total annual demand for seminatural grasslands was 17.9 million euros.