LEEP Seminar: Eliciting values for complex goods: community preferences for the marine environment

Managers and the general public may have different preferences for marine management. This implies that expert-driven planning approaches may not attract the necessary public support to achieve biodiversity objectives. To understand public preferences for management, we elicited spatially explicit non-market values for marine ecological features in South-East Queensland in Australia. Our survey revealed that the Queensland population has higher existence values for different habitat types; for example, sea grass areas were valued twice as much as inshore reef areas.