Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 50, Issues 1–2, 1 September 2004, Pages 83-99
Ecological Economics

ANALYSIS
Adaptive recreation planning and climate change: a contingent visitation approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.02.010Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper applies a contingent visitation analysis to estimate the effects of changes in climate and resource variables on nature-based recreation demand. A visitor survey at Rocky Mountain National Park included descriptions of hypothetical climate scenarios (depicting both weather- and resource-related variables), and questions about how respondents' visitation behavior would change contingent upon the scenarios. Survey responses are used to estimate the impact of climate change on park visitation and to test for the relative significance among climate scenarios and resource variables. A relatively small proportion of respondents indicated that their visitation behavior would change under the hypothetical climate scenarios, and the net effect on visitation is slightly positive. Both direct (weather-related) and indirect (resource-related) climate scenario variables are found to be statistically significant determinants of contingent expected changes in visitation. The results of the contingent visitation analysis are compared with the results of a regression analysis of historic visitation and climate variation for methodological assessment, and we find that they are in close agreement.

Introduction

Tourism is one of the world's largest industries, and ecotourism is a substantial part of the tourism industry. Since ecotourism involves resource-based recreation, it can be directly and indirectly affected by climate change. Thus, the impacts of natural resource changes on a visitor's recreation experience may affect decisions about the frequency and duration of future visits to a national park. These changes in visitor behavior will affect the recreation planning process to incorporate adaptive strategies to address a changing climate, as well as local economic activity in the park's gateway community. The purpose of this study is to estimate the role of climate variables and their effects on national park visitation using a stated-preference methodology called contingent visitation (an application of contingent behavior methodology). Climate may impact the visitor in two ways. First, the visitor's utility from his or her recreation experience may be directly affected by the weather. Changing temperature, precipitation, and snow depth may affect the visitor's decisions about the frequency or duration of future visits. Second, changes in climate patterns may affect wildlife populations and the composition of vegetation in the park, and these changes may indirectly affect visitation behavior. Survey methods are needed to gather information about park visitors, their preferences toward recreation activities, and how their visitation behavior might change under hypothetical climate scenarios. Contingent visitation analysis is employed using a visitor survey to test for the significance of direct and indirect climate scenario variables on visitation at Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) in Colorado. We believe RMNP is representative of a large number of North American national parks such as Glacier, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone in the United States and Waterton, Banff, and Jasper in Canada.

Economists have long recognized that climate affects individual well-being (Cline, 1992). Precipitation, temperature, wind, and sunshine affect location choices for migration (Blomquist et al., 1988). Madison (2003) estimates that slight (+2.5 °C) warming would result in net amenity benefits for high latitude countries. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that climate would affect recreation visitation as well.

Several studies have recorded the effects of climate on recreation. Cato and Gibbs (1973) used a survey of recreational boaters in Florida and estimated that temperature and expected rainfall had a significant effect on the likelihood of taking a boating trip. Loomis and Crespi (1999) estimated that a 2.5 °C increase in temperature and a 7% increase in precipitation were associated with a 3.1% increase in visitor days for eight groups of outdoor recreation activities. Significant decreases in downhill and cross-country skiing days (52%) were offset by increases in reservoir (9%), beach (14%), golf (14%), and stream recreation (3.5%).

Contingent visitation analysis has been applied in several previous recreation studies, but most combined stated-preference visitation data with revealed-preference travel cost data to measure contingent effects on consumer surplus Whitehead et al., 2000, Loomis et al., 2001, Grijalva et al., 2002. Loomis (1993) found that the contingent visitation method demonstrated external validity in his study of hypothetical recreational visits under varying lake quality levels. Chase et al. (1998) used contingent visitation to measure the hypothetical impact on visitation demand of alternative entrance fee levels at three national parks in Costa Rica.

Fankhauser et al. (1999) suggests that any efficient strategy to adapt to a changing climate must reflect the inherent long time horizon and uncertainties about future estimates of climate change. To that end, this paper develops climate scenarios based a 20-year forecast of climate effects, and uses confidence intervals to report the range of visitation estimates between climate scenarios (univariate hypothesis tests).

Section snippets

Theoretical model

Consider an individual's utility function, represented by u(xj,qj,z), where u(·) is utility, xj is the annual number of trips to recreation site j, qj represents the quality of site j, and I represents individual income. The individual will maximize his utility subject to his budget constraint, represented by I=pjxj+z, where pj represents the travel cost or implicit price of access to site j, and z represents a vector of all other goods, with its price normalized to one. A system of Marshallian

Hypothesis

It is hypothesized that visitation at a recreation site is influenced by expected climate conditions in the area, as well by other variables, including but not limited to a visitor's chosen recreation activities, travel costs, and demographic characteristics. Climate conditions may affect visitation both directly and indirectly. Therefore, we test the null hypothesis that the climate scenario variables (S1iD, S2iD, …, SniD; S1iI, S2iI, …, SniI) have no effect on the number of visits to the site

Empirical analysis and survey design

The recreation site for the empirical analysis is Rocky Mountain National Park, a 266,000-acre alpine preserve in north-central Colorado, in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The Park protects a large wildlife population, alpine meadows, conifer forests, aspen groves, and several high mountain peaks, including Long's Peak, the Park's tallest. RMNP receives over three million visitors annually, with significant seasonal variation (87% of annual visitation occurs between May and October,

Data collection

Members of the survey team were trained in visitor contact and survey introduction procedures at the intended sampling locations at RMNP in advance of the survey period. An intercept script and procedures for handling refusals were discussed thoroughly and were rehearsed with RMNP visitors.

During the survey period (June 21–September 12, 2001), visitors were selected randomly in frequently visited areas of RMNP at five specific locations that were selected in order to identify visitors in an

Data analysis

Respondents were asked to estimate the change in the number/duration of their visits to RMNP under the hypothetical climate regimes. The trip response model in Eq. (1) was applied to estimate coefficients for the independent variables. These coefficients allow for the measure of the sensitivity of visitation to possible changes in future climate.

The data analysis process involves the aggregation of survey results for each of the four survey versions. Since each survey included contingent

Results

The survey data revealed that most visitors planned their trips well in advance (68 days, on average) and over 66% of respondents indicated that their most recent trip to RMNP was either the “sole destination” or “primary purpose” of the trip. More than 70% of respondents indicated that the activities of viewing conifer forests, viewing wildflowers, and driving over Trail Ridge Road were either “important” or “very important” to their decisions to visit RMNP. The average distance traveled was

Methodological comparison of stated preference and revealed preference results

The results of the contingent behavior analysis indicate that visitation would increase by about 13.6% under the climate scenario depicted by the CCC circulation model and by about 9.9% under the scenario depicted by the Hadley model. These results do approximate the results found in a revealed-preference analysis. In that study, a regression analysis was used to measure the effects of climate change on visitation, using historical visitation, climate, and population data for the period ranging

Conclusions

A contingent visitation analysis was used to measure the effects of changes in direct and indirect climate scenario variables on visitation to RMNP. A visitor survey was used to ask park visitors how their visitation behavior would change under hypothetical climate scenarios. The results indicate that the effects of changes in certain climate variables would have a positive impact on visitation levels. Temperature was found to be a positive and significant determinant of visitation behavior. A

Acknowledgements

Without implicating, we would like to thank Tom Hobbs, Dennis Ojima, Jill Baron, others at Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Colorado State University and Stephan Weiler, Department of Economics, Colorado State University for assistance with the design and implementation of this study. Funding for this study was provided by the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station, Regional Research Project W1133, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency STAR grant. The clarity of this manuscript was improved

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