Increasing economic pressure brought by urbanization and continuously increasing population has brought significant impact to the overall state of the environment. Most often, these results to rapid decline of pristine ecosystem and degradation due to extraction of natural resources. Hence, robust and just policies on natural resources conservation are of utmost importance to ensure consideration of societal welfare. One of the widely used technique in understanding social perspective is by eliciting stakeholders’ perception towards a certain issue. This provide researchers and policy makers specific focus. This study, as preliminary for developing a “Payments for Ecosystem Services” scheme, conducted a survey to elicit the perception of 1500 South Carolina residents towards conservation. The objective is to elicit the priority ecosystem service of the residents to come up with a focused design for developing the PES. The analysis was also broken down to a county level assessment to find out if there is a “neighbor’s effect” towards their decision making. The study used a Rank analysis method to determine the priority ecosystem, logistic regression model for analyzing the factors that affect their prioritization, and a spatial lag model to understand if there is a “neighbor’s effect” towards their responses.
Results/Conclusions
The results showed that water related ecosystem service, particularly good water quality, is the priority ecosystem service by the residents. The regression model showed that this prioritization has something to do with: familiarity to natural resource conservation concept, professional education of the respondents, income level, and number of household members. Furthermore, the spatial lag model also suggests that, the neighboring counties’ characteristics has an effect to the average rating of another county’s satisfaction and perception, hence ultimately to their decision making process. Subsequently, the secondary ecosystem service that residents prioritize is the abundance of water. This is eye catching since many of the policies and water management plans focuses on abundance of water rather than on its quality. The results from this study could be used as an argument to consider adjustments to policies towards water management.