Recent decades have witnessed substantial losses of biodiversity in Europe, partly driven by the ecological changes associated with intensification of agricultural production. These changes have particularly affected avian (bird) diversity in marginal areas such as the uplands of the UK. We...

Globally, much biodiversity is found on private land. Acting to conserve such biodiversity thus requires the design of policies which influence the decision-making of farmers and foresters. In this paper, we outline the economic characteristics of this problem, before reviewing a number of...

Hill farming in UK is experiencing very difficult economic circumstances and many farmers rely on subsidies provided by the government for a large fraction of their income. The Peak District National Park is used as a case study to examine how farmers might respond to current policy changes �...

This paper considers farmers willingness to pay (WTP) to conserve an endangered Irish farmland bird, the Corncrake (Crex crex). An Irish National Farm Survey (NFS) is used to produce individual farm-level WTP estimates for the year 2006. These figures are then aggregated to obtain a total value...

In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non-negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for...

This paper considers the use of spatial microsimulation in the aggregation of regional environmental benefit values. The developed spatial microsimulation model uses simulated annealing to match the Irish Census of Agriculture data to a Contingent Valuation Survey that contains information on...