Corrigendum: Assessing Inequalities in Wellbeing at a Neighbourhood Scale in Low-Middle-Income-Country Secondary Cities and Their Implications for Long-Term Livability.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.729453.].

Valuing the benefits of improved marine environmental quality under multiple stressors.

Many marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from multiple stressors. In the Baltic Sea, these stressors include oil and chemical spills from shipping, nutrient run-off from land and the introduction of non-indigenous species. All of these pressures have been growing over recent years. Increasing pressures lead to reductions in environmental quality, which produce negative effects on human well-being. In this paper, the choice experiment method is used to estimate the benefits to people in Estonia resulting from reductions in pressure from multiple stressors in the Baltic Sea. The main results show that, firstly, respondents have a positive, statistically-significant willingness to pay to reduce each of the three stressors analysed. Secondly, the average willingness to pay for the improvement in the quality of all Estonian marine waters to achieve Good Environmental Status is around 65 euro per household per year, with a 95% confidence interval of 48-77 euro. Thirdly, the greatest share of value of this total economic benefit is derived from the willingness to pay for reductions in the risk of large scale oil and chemical spills.

Valuing the commons: An international study on the recreational benefits of the Baltic Sea.

The Baltic Sea provides benefits to all of the nine nations along its coastline, with some 85 million people living within the catchment area. Achieving improvements in water quality requires international cooperation. The likelihood of effective cooperation is known to depend on the distribution across countries of the benefits and costs of actions needed to improve water quality. In this paper, we estimate the benefits associated with recreational use of the Baltic Sea in current environmental conditions using a travel cost approach, based on data from a large, standardized survey of households in each of the 9 Baltic Sea states. Both the probability of engaging in recreation (participation) and the number of visits people make are modeled. A large variation in the number of trips and the extent of participation is found, along with large differences in current annual economic benefits from Baltic Sea recreation. The total annual recreation benefits are close to 15 billion EUR. Under a water quality improvement scenario, the proportional increases in benefits range from 7 to 18% of the current annual benefits across countries. Depending on how the costs of actions are distributed, this could imply difficulties in achieving more international cooperation to achieve such improvements.