Method And Empirical Study For The Evaluation Of Environmental Resources Non-use Value Based On Spatial View

Natural resources and environmental goods are the foundation of human survival and development, as play an important part in supplying materials, life support and recreation of mankind. The contingent valuation method(CVM) is an important non-market valuation method, which is widely used to evaluate the environmental goods, natural resources and public goods. The distance decay effect(DDE) of willingness to pay(WTP)is important in the study of CVM.The study of CVM always treated the evaluation object as a point, and ignored the effect of distance decay. To view the existing problems of CVM, theoretical framework and system of CVM about environmental goods had been studied systematically in the paper. It established the CVM evaluation method under spatial view. The paper classified the evaluation object under the different spatial view of Points, Lines, and Surfaces. It created the concepts, models and methods of WTP trend surface and contour image. It selected the non-use value of Songhua River as research object and design double-bounded dichotomous questionnaire to evaluate the non-use value of Songhua River. And furthermore, conducted empirical research towards the models and methods.The paper built research framework of spatial attributes of WTP and fundamental definition for spatial attribute including Object-area and Sub-area. For calculation of Sub-area coordinate and WTP mean value, the paper presented computational methods of grids division and central value. According to different spatial view of different resource types, It is categorized into three different types of spatial view of “Points”, “Lines” and “Surfaces”.For the view of “Lines”, the paper suggested distance belt division method according to adjacent relationship. For the view of “Surfaces”, the paper suggested division principle of Sub-area by modified Voronoi method. Comparing with traditional analytical methods of spatial attributes, trend surface method is simple and has less calculation. And the method could also indicate change direction and change intensity of WTP, which is a new analytical method of spatial data. For construction of WTP contour curve, the paper studied modeling method of Kriging.In questionnaire survey section, It designed double-bounded dichotomous guide question. The questionnaires survey regions were 75 areas in Jilin Province and Heilongjiang Province and there were 1660 questionnaires be reclaimed. In order to get valid questionnaires reasonably, the paper presented a new standard to filter questionnaires named relative WTP.Firstly, It analyzed basic information that social economy attribute variable frequency of the respondents along with WTP of each option, and environmental attitude variable frequency of the respondents along with WTP of each option. For interaction among the variables, the relationship among social economy attribute variables of the respondents were studied by Chi-Square analysis. And it also tested independence among varialbles including the respondent attitude for environment protection by Kendall test.In the calculation of WTP, divided WTP into four categories including Protesting WTP, Low WTP, Moderate WTP and High WTP, and the frequency is also calculated. By means of grey modeling, the average WTP is 199.71 RMB. The fit is excellent by area-ratio test and posterior variance test.Took the WTP of Songhua River non-use value as an example for spatial attributes research under the view of “Lines” and “Surfaces” and establish contour curves of WTP.Under the view of “Lines”, divided object area into four distance belts by adjacent relationship firstly. And statistical result of WTP indicated positive payment rate of Flow area was higher than other area. Secondly, studied distance decay effect of WTP by establishing Logit model. The result indicated that a river could be seen as a curv. And distance decay effect remained applicable, namely that the further the respondents from the river, the lower WTP. The statistical result about average WTP and variance of distance belts also indicated distance decay effect.In the study, It is found that the deviation of WTP decreased progressively with distance. It established retardant attenuation model to fit relationship of WTP and distance, and that of standard deviation and distance to draw curve of three-dimensional.Under the view of “Surfaces”, it divided Songhua River basin into grids with 800×1000, and then divided Sub-areas. Trend surface of WTP was constructed under spatial view. The result of trend surface shown that 75 Sub-areas of Songhua River were divided into four different grades. High WTP areas spatially aggregated around the areas that flowing across Songhua River and the WTP of upstream was a bit lower than that of downstream. And low WTP areas dispersed on both sides of Songhua River. Moran coefficient indicated that the areas with higher WTP shown obvious spatial aggregation effect but the areas with lower WTP shown lower correlation and mutual independence. The object area, as a whole, didn’t show obvious spatial aggregation effect.The Probit model result shown that influence of consumer awareness on environmental goods was mainly reflected by annual income when the model didn’t contain cognitive variable. However the significance of annual income decreased when the model contained cognitive variable. For distance decay effect of WTP, in essence, it was knowledge extent and awareness extent of consumer on environmental goods. The shorter the distance between consumer and environmental goods, the higher knowledge extended of consumer on environmental goods. And the shorter the distance between consumer and environmental goods, the more urgent demand of survival and restoration of environmental goods that shown distance decay effect.Finally, the WTP contour curves of non-use value of Songhua River were given. By the image, find that higher WTP areas spatially aggregated around the cities that flowing across or that near to Songhua River. However, the WTP of areas that further from Songhua River were lower. The spatial tendency of WTP could be reflected by contour curves, which was consistent with the result of actual investigation. From this point of view, it was valid for arguing WTP spatial attributes by means of contour curves.