Estimates of Participation and Willingness to Pay by Local Communities in Protecting and Reviving Deserts Areas (Case Study: Noush Abad of Aran and Bidgol County)

Due to the functioning of the ecosystems to support life on Earth, they play an important role. In recent years, natural resources economists have been engaged in valuation and measuring the role of natural resources in providing human welfare. They had made considerable progress in valuation of natural environment and ecological services of ecosystems. This research studies people's willingness to participate in protecting and reviving Noush Abad desert area, using the conditional valuation and tow-dimensional, dual choice questionnaire. To estimate the willingness to pay, logit regression model was used based on the maximum likelihood method and the parameters of the model were estimated. The results suggest that age, shortage of water resources (tapping too much water), family income have significant positive effects whileagricultural activity, animal husbandry, poor management and number of family members have a significant negative effect on the people's willingness to pay. Also, the factors such as age, education had positive impact while grazing has a negative impact on people's willingness to pay, but these variables were not significant at the appropriate level.The average willingness to pay of the deontologist and consequentialist people in this study to participate in protecting and reviving the deserts of Noush Abad is estimated to be 100000 and 99720 Rials, respectively.