Estimating Willingness to Pay to Avoid Changes in Agricultural Land Use: Choice Experiment Methods

Population growth and rising demand for urban services have led to an expansion of the urban area and a great deal of pressure on agricultural lands to change their use and have environmental impacts. In recent years, concerns have been raised regarding the environmental impacts of manufacturing activities. Hence, there should be fundamental principles in land resource management that can balance environmental values and economic added value. In this study, using collected data from 104 inhabitants of urban and rural areas of Siahkal County and using the choice experiment method, non-use values of agricultural land were estimated according to scenarios. The results of this study showed that respondents willing to pay more for orchards and paddy lands than the default lands, which is dryland. In addition, results show that respondents have more willingness to pay for orchards than paddy fields. On the base of the results of this study, mean willingness to pay for paddy fields and orchards are 28977.99 and 42732.53 million Rials, respectively.