ConclusionsThis study reported results from the application of choiceexperiment to assess Vietnamese households’ preferencesand motivations for biodiversity conservation in the MekongDelta of Vietnam. The results showed that a significantportion of residents were willing to pay formanagement activities to preserve biodiversity. However,a majority of respondents chose the status quo alternativebecause they simply did not care or had other prioritiesthan biodiversity conservation. Only 34 % of respondentswere willing to pay for the proposed conservation project(respondents who selected an alternative to status quo atleast one were considered to be willing to pay). The reasonsfor their willingness to pay were an increase inhealthy vegetation and mammal species and prevention ofthe welfare losses of local farmers. Respondents werewilling to trade off VND 913 monthly increase ofhousehold water bill for an additional percent of healthyvegetation, VND 360 for increasing one more mammalspecies and VND 2,440 for preventing the welfare lossesof 100 local farmers. On the other hand, the insignificantattributes of Bird and Reptile revealed that respondentswere not so much interested in an increase in bird andreptile species.In addition, the results of interaction variables with theconstant showed that older respondents were more likely tochoose the status quo rather than the conservation project,while those with higher education, income, biodiversityknowledge or environmental concern revealed a higherlikelihood of selecting the project. The findings from theestimates of marginal rates of substitution between nonmonetaryattributes investigated that in the trade-offbetween biodiversity conservation and the welfare losses,for instance, to increase 1 % extra healthy vegetation thatwas equivalent to nearly 3 extra numbers of mammalspecies, about 40 local farmers could be hurt in terms of thelosses of cultivated land or productivity due to the activitiesof the conservation project. These values could be usefuland trustworthy information for policy makers to makeright decisions in terms of the cost–benefit analysis and thetrade-off between biodiversity and economics, etc. in the
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