Abstract
We investigate conflicts between wildlife conservation and recreational use that can occur at open-access sites when visitors dislike crowding. A theoretical model is proposed which determines the spatial distributions of visitors to a beach, given their willingness to walk to avoid crowding and the configuration of beach access points. This model is estimated for three sections of coastline in eastern England using data from aerial video photography. Visitor density is strongly and negatively correlated with distance from access points. Willingness to walk has a highly skewed population distribution. We discuss the implications of these findings for the management of conflicts between conservation and recreation at open-access sites.
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Notes
See, for example, De Ruyck et al. (1997a), Dharmaratne and Braithwaite (1998), Tunstall et al. (1998), Hanley et al. (2003), Chen et al. (2004), and Kubas et al. (2005). Coombes et al. (2009) investigate demand for beach use at a finer spatial resolution, but do not consider the effects of crowding.
DeRuyck et al. (1997b) investigate beach use at an extreme micro level, counting the number of tourists in 10-m grid squares on two dates at three South African beaches. They find that, at this level of spatial resolution, the distribution of tourists is clustered. This level of resolution is too fine to pick out any tendency for parties of visitors to separate themselves from one another.
This light-touch approach to achieving policy objectives without using either overt prohibitions or monetary charges has some similarities with the ‘nudge’ approach advocated by Sunstein and Thaler (2003). However, unlike policies motivated by Sunstein and Thaler’s ‘libertarian paternalism’, a policy of increasing the distance that visitors have to walk to reach environmentally sensitive locations is not paternalistic, and its effectiveness does not depend on individual irrationality.
Formally, the distinction between goods and bads is merely the direction in which they are measured. Whether one defines preferences over combinations of the bads of distance and crowding or over combinations of their negatives (the goods of ‘accessibility’ and ‘solitude’) is a matter of notational convenience.
It is not clear whether either of these two types of beach use creates systematically more wildlife disturbance than the other. Movement in itself can be a cause of disturbance, but so too can prolonged human presence in one location. The beach areas that are favoured by picnickers and sunbathers (typically around the high-tide line) may be more susceptible to disturbance than the more seaward areas that are often easier to walk on.
Linearity of the utility function is convenient but not essential for the main conclusions of our model. What is essential is that the subjective trade-off between distance and crowding is represented by a single ‘willingness to walk’ parameter which can take different values for different individuals, and that at every point in \(<\)distance, crowding\(>\) space, the marginal rate of substitution between crowding and distance (in the linear model, \(-1/\alpha _{i})\) increases monotonically with the value of that parameter. Non-homogeneity in subjectively-valued beach characteristics could be taken into account by adding additional arguments to the utility function. This would not require major changes to the model, provided that \(\alpha _{i}\) remained the only individual-specific utility parameter.
This result holds for a wide range of plausible utility functions, and not merely the linear function (1).
To see why this is not invariably the case, consider the example presented in Sect. 3 under the assumption of a bimodal distribution of willingness-to-walk. Option 2 increases the value of \(u^{*}(\alpha )\) at \(\alpha = 3\). Intuitively, visitors with high willingness-to-walk may benefit from reductions in accessibility which concentrate other visitors into shorter lengths of beach.
Since such people are typically observed at locations that are more crowded than those that at which they choose to settle down, this imparts a downward bias to our estimation of the population distribution of the willingness-to-walk parameter. However, for the reasons explained in Sect. 2, we think that the effect of this bias is relatively small, except perhaps at the upper extreme of the willingness-to-walk distribution.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the NERC/ESRC/EPSRC for funding this work through the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. WJS is funded by Arcadia. Viola Kimmel and Emma Coombes digitised the locations of visitors to the beach. Ordnance Survey kindly provided the MasterMap data: \(\copyright \) All Rights Reserved, Ordnance Survey Licence Number 10024462, 2003. Amy Doherty provided meteorological data. We thank two anonymous referees for comments on a previous version of the paper.
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Tratalos, J.A., Sugden, R., Bateman, I.J. et al. The Conflict Between Conservation and Recreation When Visitors Dislike Crowding: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Spatial Distribution of Recreational Beach Users. Environ Resource Econ 55, 447–465 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-013-9634-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-013-9634-2