Scale and Quantity Effects and Their Importance for Benefit Transfer of Natural Resource Values in the Fitzroy Basin, Research Report No. 5

Abstract

Policy makers are often interested in how values for an environmental asset may be is aggregated into component pieces and transferred from one site to another. This issue can be described in relation to environmental values for the Fitzroy Basin in Central Queensland. The Basin comprises several smaller catchments that share similar development opportunities, environmental issues and water resource constraints. This paper describes the application of Choice Modelling to estimate environmental and social values for the Basin as a whole and two of its component sub-catchments. The results of the application provide an understanding of how the values estimated at different scales may be related. If there are no significant differences in values estimated at different scales, it implies that benefit transfer may be undertaken for different sites at different scales without adjustment. Various experiments using scale and quantity variances are reported to allow comparison of the estimates.

Keywords: value transfers, choice modeling, scale effects, quantity effects