Planning on a wider scale - Swedish forest owners' preferences for landscape policy attributes

Abstract

A tax-fund system has been proposed to advance Swedish forest conservation. We present a choice experiment with Swedish private forest owners on preferences for attributes of a tax-fund system. Focusing on three aspects: (i) freedom to choose set-asides, (ii) equity issues, and (iii) frequency of nature inventories, we find two groups of forest owners. The first is opposed to interventions that could curtail liberty and oppose frequent nature inventories, while a smaller group would derive positive utility from jointly deciding on the location of set-asides with society. Both groups have a preference for changing the current tax-base to soil productivity or timber volume. The tax-base chosen together with the modalities of re-distributing the funds will determine the program's efficiency. The paper concludes that a tax-fund system could indeed be a way forward but would need to be designed in a participatory manner to reconcile forest owners, forest industry representatives, and conservationists.

Keywords

Choice experiments; Biodiversity; Boreal forest; Landscape planning; Sweden

Published in

Forest Policy and Economics
2019, volume: 104, pages: 170-181
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

SLU Authors

• Bostedt, Göran

  • Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Umeå University

• Ekvall, Hans

  • Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Global goals (SDG)

SDG15 Life on land

UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science
Economics

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.04.013

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/100326