Metropolitan Residents' Preferences and Willingness to Pay for a Life Zone Forest for Mitigating Heat Island Effects during Summer Season in Korea

Abstract

Coupled with green house effects, the urban heat island is occurring more frequently, and thus is becoming a serious social problem. In order to elicit policy implications, the current study assesses the economic values on the heat island-mitigating functions of urban forest through choice experiments. The analytical results suggest that metropolitan city residents' utility can be increased by raising the size of life zone forests which is comprised of street trees, parks in residential regions, and small forests in school zones. The derived marginal willingness to pay for the life zone forests suggest that the respondents are willing to pay $56.68-76.59 for every increase of the urban forest by 1 m(2).