Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

We are living in a crisis era, with competing land use for finite land and ill-informed myopic urban land-use policies that remain stagnant, in a world with a rapidly changing urban environment, such as the mushrooming urban agriculture. While smallholder farms in and around cities, in sub-Saharan Africa, provide many ecosystem services including boosting household income and nutrition, and access to land constraints these benefits. This paper examines the willingness to pay for urban farm plots, using a random parameter logit model.

Forest ecosystem services are critical for human well-being as well as functioning and growth of economies. However, despite the growing demand for these services, they are hardly given due consideration in public policy formulation. The values attached to these services by local communities are also generally unknown in developing countries. Using a case study of the Mau forest conservancy in Kenya, this study applied a choice experiment technique to estimate the value attached to salient forest ecosystem services by forest-adjacent communities.