Perceptions of the seriousness of major public health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic in seven middle-income countries.

INTRODUCTION: Public perception of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to six other major public health problems (alcoholism and drug use, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, lung cancer and respiratory diseases caused by air pollution and smoking, and water-borne diseases like diarrhea) is unclear. We designed a survey to examine this issue using YouGov's internet panels in seven middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in early 2022. METHODS: Respondents rank ordered the seriousness of the seven health problems using a repeated best-worst question format. Rank-ordered logit models allow comparisons within and across countries and assessment of covariates. RESULTS: In six of the seven countries, respondents perceived other respiratory illnesses to be a more serious problem than COVID-19. Only in Vietnam was COVID-19 ranked above other respiratory illnesses. Alcoholism and drug use was ranked the second most serious problem in the African countries. HIV/AIDS ranked relatively high in all countries. Covariates, particularly a COVID-19 knowledge scale, explained differences within countries; statistics about the pandemic were highly correlated with differences in COVID-19's perceived seriousness. CONCLUSIONS: People in the seven middle-income countries perceived COVID-19 to be serious (on par with HIV/AIDS) but not as serious as other respiratory illnesses. In the African countries, respondents perceived alcoholism and drug use as more serious than COVID-19. Our survey-based approach can be used to quickly understand how the threat of a newly emergent disease, like COVID-19, fits into the larger context of public perceptions of the seriousness of health problems.

We were curious what people in different countries thought about the seriousness of COVID-19 compared to other health problems. We designed a survey, and hired YouGov, a survey research firm, to administer it in seven countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in early 2022. Respondents answered the questions on their computer, tablets, or smart phones. Their answers revealed that in most countries respiratory illnesses were perceived to be a more serious problem than COVID-19. In Africa people felt that alcoholism and drug use were also more serious than COVID-19. These findings are important because they show that people still care about the health problems they were facing before the pandemic, which is useful information for healthcare providers.

The economics of conservation debt: a natural capital approach to revealed valuation of ecological dynamics.

Some species are valued for their direct usefulness to society, through immediate financial returns from market activities such as harvesting or ecotourism. But many are valued for their passive usefulness, i.e., their mere existence contributes to supporting, regulating or cultural environmental services that support human well-being. Hence, there is inherent social value to conserving such species as natural assets. However, such species are seldom priced as natural assets, and thus not accounted for in sustainability wealth measures because deriving non-market prices is challenging. We overcome this limitation by presenting a new approach for natural asset pricing of species with passive value that can be incorporated into national sustainability wealth accounting. We explicitly consider the relationship between prevailing institutions, species interactions, and ecosystem dynamics. Our approach is illustrated with the case of threatened woodland caribou in the Alberta Oil Sands. We show that conservation can be considered an investment while destructive activities can lead to a loss or conservation debt; and forgoing destructive activities can be considered a capital gain, increasing future wealth. Our approach reveals that caribou conservation in Alberta is leading to a conservation debt on the order of CA$800 million.

Assessing ecological infrastructure investments.

Conventional markets can underprovide ecosystem services. Deliberate creation of a market for ecosystem services [e.g., a payments for ecosystem services (PES) scheme] can close the gap. The new ecosystem service market alters behaviors and quantities of ecosystem service provided and reveals prices for the ecosystems service: a market-clearing equilibrium. Assessing the potential for PES programs, which often act as ecological infrastructure investment mechanisms, requires forecasting the market-clearing equilibrium. Forecasting the equilibrium is complicated, especially at relevant social and ecological scales. It requires greater disciplinary integration than valuing ecosystem services or computing the marginal cost of making a land-use change to produce a service. We conduct an ex ante benefit-cost assessment and forecast market-clearing prices and quantities for ecological infrastructure investment contracts in the Panama Canal Watershed. The Panama Canal Authority could offer contracts to private farmers to change land use to increase dry-season water flow and reduce sedimentation. A feasible voluntary contracting system yields a small program of about 1,840 ha of land conversion in a 279,000-ha watershed and generates a 4.9 benefit-cost ratio. Physical and social constraints limit market supply and scalability. Service delays, caused by lags between the time payments must be made and the time services stemming from ecosystem change are realized, hinder program feasibility. Targeting opportunities raise the benefit-cost ratio but reduce the hectares likely to be converted. We compare and contrast our results with prior state-of-the-art assessments on this system.

Status-quo management of marine recreational fisheries undermines angler welfare.

Recreational fisheries can have a significant impact on fish populations and can suffer from the same symptoms of open access as commercial fisheries. However, recreational fisheries receive little attention compared with their commercial counterparts. Regulations designed to allocate scarce fish, such as seasonal closures and bag limits, can result in significant losses of value to anglers. We provide an estimate of these foregone benefits by estimating the potential gains to implementing management reforms of the headboat portion of the recreational red snapper fishery in the US Gulf of Mexico. This fishery has suffered from a regulatory spiral of shortened seasons and lowered bag limits in spite of rebuilding stocks. We gather primary survey data of headboat anglers that elicit trip behavior and their planned number and seasonal distribution of trips under status-quo and alternative management approaches. We use these data to estimate a model of anglers' seasonal trip demand as a function of the ability to retain red snapper, bag limits, and fees. We find that a hypothetical rights-based policy, whereby vessels with secure rights to a portion of annual catch could offer their customers year-round fishing in exchange for lower per-angler retention and increased fees, could raise the average angler's welfare by $139/y. When placed in the global context of recreational fishing, these estimates suggest that status-quo management may deprive anglers of billions of dollars of lost economic value per year.

Baseline risk and marginal willingness to pay for health risk reduction.

Empirical results presented in this paper suggest that parents' marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for a reduction in morbidity risk from heart disease is inversely related to baseline risk (i.e., the amount of risk initially faced) both for themselves and for their children. For instance, a 40% reduction from the mean of baseline risk results in an increase in MWTP by 70% or more. Thus, estimates of monetary benefits of public programs to reduce heart disease risk would be understated if the standard practice is followed of evaluating MWTP at initial risk levels and then multiplying this value by the number of cases avoided. Estimates are supported by: (1) unique quantitative information on perceptions of the risk of getting heart disease that allow baseline risk to be defined at an individual level and (2) improved econometric procedures to control for well-known difficulties associated with stated preference data.

Selection of reserves for woodland caribou using an optimization approach.

Habitat protection has been identified as an important strategy for the conservation of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus). However, because of the economic opportunity costs associated with protection it is unlikely that all caribou ranges can be protected in their entirety. We used an optimization approach to identify reserve designs for caribou in Alberta, Canada, across a range of potential protection targets. Our designs minimized costs as well as three demographic risk factors: current industrial footprint, presence of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and climate change. We found that, using optimization, 60% of current caribou range can be protected (including 17% in existing parks) while maintaining access to over 98% of the value of resources on public lands. The trade-off between minimizing cost and minimizing demographic risk factors was minimal because the spatial distributions of cost and risk were similar. The prospects for protection are much reduced if protection is directed towards the herds that are most at risk of near-term extirpation.

Sustainable forest management preferences of interest groups in three regions with different levels of industrial forestry: an exploratory attribute-based choice experiment.

The challenge of sustainable forest management is to integrate diverse and sometimes conflicting management objectives. In order to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of the aspects influencing the preferences of diverse groups and how these groups make trade-offs between different attributes of SFM. We compare the SFM preferences of interest groups in regions with different forest use histories based on the reasoning that the condition of the forest reflects the forest use history of the area. The condition of the forest also shapes an individual's forest values and attitudes. These held values and attitudes are thought to influence SFM preferences. We tested whether the SFM preferences vary amongst the different interest groups within and across regions. We collected data from 252 persons using a choice experiment approach, where participants chose multiple times among different options described by a combination of attributes that are assigned different levels. The novelty of our approach was the use of choice experiments in the assessment of regional preference differences. Given the complexity of inter-regional comparison and the small sample size, this was an exploratory study based on a purposive rather than random sample. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the aggregation of preferences of all individuals within a region does not reveal all information necessary for forest management planning since opposing viewpoints could cancel each other out and lead to an interpretation that does not reflect possibly polarised views. Although based on a small sample size, the preferences of interest groups within a region are generally statistically significantly different from each other; however preferences of interest groups across regions are also significantly different. This illustrates the potential importance of assessing heterogeneity by region and by group.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) potential economic impact on cervid farming in Alberta.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) was found in wild deer populations in the province of Alberta, Canada, in 2005, and there is concern that this finding could create significant costs related to the farmed elk and deer industry. These potential costs or "values at risk" can be used to assess the economic returns from CWD containment and eradication programs. Cost estimates of CWD to cervid farms range from $12 million for additional farm fencing to hundreds of millions of dollars in payments by governments to discontinue cervid farming.

The willingness to pay for reducing pain and pain-related disability.

OBJECTIVES: We sought to identify chronic pain patients' preferences for levels of improvement in pain-related morbidity (PRM) by measuring their willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing their pain intensity and pain-related disability. METHODS: The study was a cross-sectional nonrandomized design. Participants were recruited from a tertiary multidisciplinary pain center in Canada. A computer-administered discrete-choice experiment was used to explore participants' WTP for various levels of improvement to PRM. Participants chose between two varying combination of treatments that differed in terms of their level of improvement in pain intensity, level of improvement in pain-related disability, and out-of-pocket monthly cost. RESULTS: The WTP to completely minimize PRM was $1428 per month. Reduction in pain intensity was valued more highly than functional improvement. For every dollar, an individual was WTP to improve his/her disability to the lowest severity (mild), he/she was WTP approximately $2 to reduce pain intensity to moderate and $3 to reduce pain intensity to mild. The potential return on investment in terms of health improvement gained was $3318 per patient visit per year. CONCLUSION: The morbidity associated with chronic pain is worth approximately $1428 for every month in the chronic pain health state. From the patient's perspective, treatment and management strategies that focus on reducing pain intensity would have the greatest impact on improving health-related quality of life. Valuing health improvement in monetary terms allows for direct monetary comparisons between the costs of chronic pain interventions and their associated health returns.

Modeling opportunity costs of conservation in transitional landscapes.

Conservation scientists recognize the urgency of incorporating opportunity costs into conservation planning. Despite this, applications to date have been limited, perhaps partly because of the difficulty in determining costs in regions with limited data on land prices and ownership. We present methods for estimating opportunity costs of land preservation in landscapes or ecoregions that are a changing mix of agriculture and natural habitat. Our approach derives from the literature on estimating land values as opportunity costs of alternate land uses and takes advantage of general availability of necessary data, even in relatively data-poor regions. The methods integrate probabilities of habitat conversion with region-wide estimates of economic benefits from agricultural land uses and estimate land values with a discount rate to convert annual values into net present values. We applied our method in a landscape undergoing agricultural conversion in Paraguay. Our model of opportunity costs predicted an independent data set of land values and was consistent with implicit discount rates of 15-25%. Model-generated land values were strongly correlated with actual land values even after correcting for the effect of property size and proportion of property that was forested. We used the model to produce a map of opportunity costs and to estimate the costs of conserving forest within two proposed corridors in the landscape. This method can be applied to conservation planning in situations where natural habitat is currently being converted to market-oriented land uses. Incorporating not only biological attributes but also socioeconomic data can help in the design of efficient networks of protected areas that represent biodiversity at minimum costs.

Economic benefits of biodiversity exceed costs of conservation at an African rainforest reserve.

Economic research on biodiversity conservation has focused on the costs of conservation reserves and the benefits of intact ecosystems; however, no study has simultaneously considered the costs and benefits of species diversity, a fundamental component of biodiversity. We quantified the costs and benefits of avian biodiversity at a rainforest reserve in Uganda through a combination of economic surveys of tourists, spatial land-use analyses, and species-area relationships. Our results show that revising entrance fees and redistributing ecotourism revenues would protect 114 of 143 forest bird species (80%) under current market conditions. This total would increase to 131 species (approximately 90%) if entrance fees were optimized to capture the tourist's willingness to pay for forest visits and the chance of seeing increased numbers of bird species. In contrast, the cost of purchasing agricultural land for ecological rehabilitation of the avian habitat would be economically prohibitive. These results suggest that local biodiversity markets could play a positive role in tropical conservation strategies if the appropriate institutions for redistribution can be developed.

Incorporating natural capital into economy-wide impact analysis: a case study from Alberta.

Traditionally, decision-makers have relied on economic impact estimates derived from conventional economy-wide models. Conventional models lack the environmental linkages necessary for examining environmental stewardship and economic sustainability, and in particular the ability to assess the impact of policies on natural capital. This study investigates environmentally extended economic impact estimation on a regional scale using a case study region in the province of Alberta known as the Foothills Model Forest (FMF). Conventional economic impact models are environmentally extended in pursuit of enhancing policy analysis and local decision-making. It is found that the flexibility of the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling approach offers potential for environmental extension, with a solid grounding in economic theory. The CGE approach may be the tool of the future for more complete integrated environment and economic impact assessment.