Resource information
Parks and protected areas are valuable
assets to developing nations, whether viewed as
environmental, economic or social goods. Nevertheless, to
date there are few examples where the full potential
economic rent of protected areas has been captured
efficiently or distributed effectively. This severely limits
the capacity of developing nations to sustain their natural
resources. In Sub-Saharan Africa the crisis is acute,
characterized by the rapid pace of deforestration, soil
erosion, destruction of flora and fauna, and the depletion
of water supplies. Many African nations have completed
national environmental assessments that call for an
expansion and diversification of protected areas. Several
areas have been designated as protected areas- national
parks, game preserves, wildlife management areas all with
different levels of restrictions on their use by members of
local communities. The methods of valuation used to
determine appropriate levels of compensation for local
communities and for cost recovery through users' fees
to make natural resource management sustainable requires
innovative approaches to valuing stakeholder opportunity
costs, recreational demand, and existence value. The
Contingent Valuation (CV) method is one way of determining
levels of willingness-to-pay of visitors to protected areas
and willingness to accept compensation by local residents.
Once appropriate valuation techniques have been used, the
key is to determine a viable benefit sharing scheme for
shareholders to share rents and compensate local residents
for foregone access to those natural resources found in the
protected area.
