Restoration of habitat is critical to recovery and conservation of Earth’s myriad ecosystems. Billions of dollars are spent each year on restoration projects around the world, and while the benefits to targeted flora, fauna and habitats are well established, ancillary benefits, such as enhanced recreation opportunities and reduced flood risk are still poorly understood. Efforts, spanning decades, to recover endangered species act (ESA) listed anadromous Pacific salmon in the Pacific Northwest, USA, are a shining example and opportunity to demonstrate some of the aforementioned indirect benefits of restoration activities, and these projects are commonly motivated by complimentary objectives such as flood control, environmental remediation, and aesthetic enhancements. We hypothesize that large-scale salmon restoration projects that also address flood control, yield ecosystem service enhancements that are capitalized into local housing values. We developed a hedonic pricing model to estimate the value of ecosystem services provided by salmon habitat restoration projects in the Puget Sound region of Washington State, USA. We used historical real estate transaction data, reported at the individual tax parcel level, in an urban/suburban region that in 2014 implemented several large-scale salmon restoration projects. We also incorporated attributes of environmental amenities that affected real estate value, derived from multiple existing geospatial data layers.
Results/Conclusions
We found that sales prices of houses located in high-risk flood areas increased appreciably in response to the restoration investment. However, we find that the investment had no significant effect on house prices in the highest risk areas, where purchase of flood insurance is mandatory. We present a theoretical explanation of the results and estimate implicit prices for the restoration investment. Overall, we found that the total capitalization of restoration benefits in study area properties exceed the cost of the restoration project. Understanding the co-benefits of large-scale habitat restoration projects can inform restoration planning decisions and trade-offs. We discuss the implications of our findings for habitat restoration planning.