Scale and scope effects on communities’ values for environmental improvements in the Namoi catchment: A choice modelling approach

This report presents results of research designed to investigate variations in willingness to pay (WTP) estimates across different scales and scopes of environmental investments. The goal is to help catchment management authorities better prioritise their natural resource management actions at both catchment and farm levels. Five split samples were used to test for scale and scope effects. A choice modelling (CM) analysis that involved the estimation of conditional logit was used to elicit household WTP for improvements in environmental quality attributes in the Namoi catchment. The approach was developed to facilitate the more accurate transfer of value estimates between different scopes of actions.