Estimating Conservation Value of Lighvan Chay River Using Contingent Valuation Method

Lighvan Chay River in East Azerbaijan province named as one of the important tourism zone of the province because of its many natural places for leisure, entertainment and recreational opportunities like field trips and camping. Environmental goods and services are more open access public goods. Lack of awareness of the actual value of the environment is one of the important factors of ignoring the environmental issues and causes environmental deteoration. Therefore, the issue of estimating the environmental value can be helpful to policy-makers and practitioners involved in the conservation and management of natural resources. The aim of this research is to estimate the conservation value of the Lighvan Chay River with the use of contingent valuation method and Double–Bounded Dichotomous Choice (DDC). Results from 149 questionnaires were completed from visitors (in the summer of 2012). Estimating logit model shows that the price offer variable at 1%, marital status and satisfaction of utilities variables were significant at the 5% level and numbers of visits variables was significant at the 10% level. The offered bid variable has marginal effect -0.00004 shows that an increase a unit of bid makes 0.00003 unit decrease in WTP. In this paper willings to pay to protect the area was calculated $2 per month per person by using Shazam 10. Since the average family size was 4.22, so average willings to pay of each family per month was $1.9340. Finally, Mean willingness to pay for each family per year, was calculated $1. Therefore, the formation of the association to preserve the area is recommended. However, according to the positive effect of numbers of visits variable, to facilitate the area’s accessibility by improving road networks is recommended.