Forest Owners Motivations for Adopting Programs of Biodiversity Protection

Open Access

Abstract

The results of a survey of private forest owners on adoption of a number of current programs, that include biodiversity protection to some degree, are presented. Adoption amounts to 22% for all the programs jointly, and is shown to depend on economic, social and ethical motives, with significant crowding-out between the economic and ethical motives, but not with social motives. Adoption of each program is strongly negatively correlated to each other. Nearly no respondent adopted the Natura 2000 program. The results constitute a test of the " reputational crowding-out " theory of Bénabou and Tirole (2006)