Abstract

Outdoor recreation activities have the potential to promote public health by encouraging physical and mental well-being. Sweden has the policy of “Right of Public Access” to nature areas for recreation. This provides people free access to private and public lands and gives them the opportunity to roam freely. This policy is aimed at promoting people’s participation in recreational activities (Emmelin et al. 2010). Although people have free access to nature areas for recreation in Sweden the provision of amenities for recreation has often focused on the supply side and less effort has been made to understand the demand side (Fredman et al. 2012). The Knowledge of people’s preferences and demand for nature will help outdoor recreation authorities in the design and provision of nature areas that meet societal needs. This paper reports on a study, which explored the frequency of visits to nature areas for recreation and the influence of travel cost, recreational activities and socioeconomic factors on these visits using the travel cost method. The data were collected from a mail questionnaire that involved Swedish residents who were randomly selected from a national register. Because this study focuses on outdoor recreation close to home the length of stay at recreation site was restricted to ≤24 hours and the distance of ≤80 km of home to the site in order to exclude tourism. It is important to differentiate outdoor recreation close to home from tourism because they often compete for the same resources such as money and time. In Sweden people travel to nature area by different means such as car, bicycle and on foot. This implies that estimating travel cost by using actual fuel price incurred in relation to the travel it will exclude people who have not travelled by fuel-powered transport means from the estimation. This leads to underestimation of the economic value of outdoor recreation. To remedy this weakness, distance from home to nature area (travel distance) and price of quantity of fuel that can be used to cover the travel distance was used in the estimation of travel cost. A negative binomial regression model was used to account for the factors influencing frequency of visits to nature areas. The results showed that the respondents had average visits of approximately 80 times each year. Multiplying the travel distance by fuel price gave an average travel cost of 22 Swedish Kronor (SEK, i.e. 3 US$) for each visit. The consumer surplus for all the respondents was 77 SEK (11 US$) for each visit, 117 SEK (16 US$) for those who lived in urban areas and 47 SEK (6 US$) for the respondents who lived in rural areas. The frequency of visits was influenced by travel cost, time spent at recreation site, location of home, type of recreation activity and dog ownership. The results suggest that people who live in urban areas would be willing to pay more money for outdoor recreation than people in rural areas, which implies that people in urban areas have a lesser access to nature areas. Thus it is important to provide more nature areas in urban areas to provide people who live there with more opportunities for recreation. The results will contribute to land use planning process by considering societal demand for recreation. If the strategy is to increase the frequency of visits to nature areas for recreation, it is important to provide amenities that make nature areas more accessible to people and their demand should be integrated into the provision and management of the amenities.

Keywords

amenities; demand; distance; outdoor recreation; travel cost

Published in

Title: Crossing Boundaries Urban Forests – Green cities
Publisher: European Forum on Urban Forestry

Conference

17th International Conference of the European Forum on Urban Forestry

SLU Authors

• Ezebilo, Eugene Ejike

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Food Science
Economics
Environmental Sciences


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/61259