Benefits and Costs of the Wildlife Enhancement Scheme: A Case Study of the Pevensey Levels

The paper describes a contingent valuation study of the benefits and costs of the Wildlife Enhancement Scheme (WES) (English Nature) on the Pevensey Levels Site of Special Scientific Interest in East Sussex, England. Using a conventional mean WTP value as the appropriate measure of benefits gave a benefit/cost (B/C) ratio of 0.497 for user value and 1.994 for user plus non-user values (households within 60 km of the site) for expenditure under WES. If a more rigorous and conservative truncated mean value was employed, then B/C ratios fell to 0.117 for user values and 0.758 for user plus non-user values. However, assuming the same level of passive use values are held by a similar proportion of all non-visiting households in the UK as observed in the sample survey, this would produce a B/C ratio for truncated mean user plus non-user benefits of 18.26. Even if the addition of further WES sites across the country led to a steep decline in mean marginal non-user WTP for the scheme in the Levels, the B/C ratio would still greatly exceed 1.0.