TY - JOUR
TI - Public acceptance of and heterogeneity in behavioral beach trip responses to offshore wind farm development in Catalonia (Spain)
AU - Voltaire, L
AU - Koutchade, O
T2 - Resource and Energy Economics
AB - A combined travel cost – contingent behaviour survey of residents and tourists in Catalonia is conducted on-site to examine the effects on beach recreational demand of developing an offshore wind farm (OWF) project. The survey considers four potential OWF scenarios with different degrees of visual impact. We allow for heterogeneity in trip preferences among individuals and control for on-site sampling through the use of a random parameters negative binomial (RPNB) model and a Multivariate Poisson log-normal (MPLN) model, respectively. The welfare measures derived from the RPNB model relate to the current beach users only, whereas those from the MPLN model refer to the general population of residents and tourists in Catalonia. The results show the importance of the specific place of location of the OWF project and how the installation of wind turbines would significantly decrease the demand for trips, depending on their degree of visual impacts, leading to a substantial welfare loss. However, the results also show that the project mainly would cause a displacement of trips to other beaches within Catalonia rather than outside Catalonia and that the welfare per trip measures generated by the RPNB and MPLN models substantially differ. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.
DA - 2020/05//
PY - 2020
VL - 60
SP - 101152
UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928765519300302
DO - 10.1016/j.reseneeco.2020.101152
LA - English
KW - Wind Energy
KW - Fixed Offshore Wind
KW - Human Dimensions
KW - Recreation & Tourism
KW - Visual Impacts
ER -