Assessing Economic and Shared Social Values of Forest Conservation to Improve Water Availability: A Case Study of the Protected Forest Reserve of El Quinini, Colombia

Most of the rural population of developing countries depends on forest ecosystems; consequently, there is a myriad of trade-offs that jeopardize the ability of the forest to produce goods and services. To maintain the current forest cover and offer opportunities to improve rural livelihoods, more attention has been paid to the development of strategies to assess the plurality of values associated with ecosystem services. Stated preference methods have served to asses non-market values of ecosystem goods and services; nevertheless, they have been criticized for their inability to reflect social values and the limited stakeholder´s participation in the selection of attributes for valuation. The aim of this study was to asses shared social values associated with water provision to further integrate them as attributes for contingent valuation. The study was conducted in a small community in central Colombia. Shared social values, the values held in common by forest owners, were assessed through application of problem tree and participatory mapping techniques; and the willingness to pay method was used for economic valuation. Results showed that forest owners expressed their shared social values as three projects to aimed at enhancing the health of the forest in the reserve: environmental education, forest restoration, and agroforestry. The contingent valuation indicated that despite the very low income of forest owners (US$251.32 per month), there was a high support (74%) to pay an extra US$ 1.84 per month in the water bill to implement the projects. Our study presented a systematic procedure that combines methodologies to assess the multiple ways in which forest ecosystems are important to people. Ecosystem services have collective significance that can be assessed in small local communities to enable participation in policy making.