Financing nature conservation through ecotourism: Exploring the introduction of parking fees in Cansiglio forest

The growing demand for nature-based recreation, especially after COVID-19, highlights how people are motivated to visit natural areas, such as forests. The Cansiglio Forest (Veneto region, Northern Italy) is interested by an intense tourist flow during the high season (summer and autumn), which is impacting the area with cars parked in inadequate places (by the side of the road), and air and noise pollution. With an increased demand for cultural and regulating ecosystem services (ES), there are also increased costs for the managers of the natural areas, who need further funding. If visitors are willing to pay (WTP) for the provision of such ES, the managers can use these resources to reinvest them in the area by managing congestion and improving the ES and activities related to it. In this light, the managers of Cansiglio forest (Veneto Agricoltura) are considering charging a parking fee as a way to enable this payment. To tailor parking fees to visitors’ willingness to pay to support the maintenance of ES, the latter can be estimated via non-market valuation techniques, such as Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE). DCE is a survey-based tool that allows estimating the WTP values for goods and services and elicits which site characteristics (such as ES) (attributes) are determinants of people’s preferences. The present study proposes a framework to elicit visitors’ WTP value for the ES provided by Cansiglio Forest, including a review of the attributes most commonly used in similar studies, examples of parking fees being charged in natural areas, and motivational theories which help accounting for how socio-psychological aspects can affect WTP values. More specifically, the push and pull framework is proposed as the backbone for the future survey, using the Recreation Experience Preference Scale (REP) as a tool for investigating the push factors (motivations) and the DCE as the tool for pull factors (site characteristics). A list of attributes and a list of motivations are suggested as inputs for further discussions among the stakeholders of Cansiglio, representing the first step of the future survey. Additional aspects related to how parking fees are being charged in other natural areas are exposed. The results of this thesis represent a starting point for determining the value of ES provided by Cansiglio Forest, as a tool to define an appropriate parking fee and also for discussions around potential policies in Italy aiming at supporting the maintenance of natural areas.