Improving choice experiment for forest biodiversity valuation and management

PhD defence

Fatemeh Bakhtiari

Summary

The overall purpose and contribution of this thesis is increasing the understanding of components of the value of environmental goods. It investigates how the public perceive environmental goods (lay people’s perception) and the elements of it that they value. Providing such knowledge contributes to improving valuation methods, e.g. the use of the Choice Experiment (CE) for valuing forest biodiversity conservation. Increasing knowledge of lay people’s perception and mental constructs of environmental goods can help researchers to know how they can present environmental goods in CEs which align with respondents’ perceptions and to further understand the appropriate way of measuring these values.

Principal Supervisor

Professor Jette Bredahl Jacobsen, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee

Associate Professor Soren Bøye Olsen, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen (chairman);

Senior Researcher Berit Hasler, lnstitut for Milovidenskab, Science & technology, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark;

Assistant professor Anna Bartczak, Head of Warsaw Ecological Economics Center, University of Warsaw, Poland.