Measuring Recreation Benefit Loss under Climate Change with Revealed and Stated Behavior Data: The Case of Lac Saint-Pierre World Biosphere Reserve (Québec, Canada)

The related questions for both methods used in the paper are reported in Annex.

Although the absolute level of the tourism revenue may present bias and imprecision, we still believe the relative number about the percentage of reduction in the tourism revenue to be relevant.

Although some interesting literatures have developed around the credibility of both the auto-reported travel cost and the standardized transport cost proxied by distance (see Randall 1994; Ovaskainen et al. 2012, among others), using the fuel cost and car wear as proxy of travel cost is a common way in the related literature, since very often the transport cost consists of the biggest expenditure of a trip. By using this proxy, we depart from the tourism revenue context since in both the travel cost and the contingent behavior data, we were more interested to measure visitors’ preference captured in consumer surplus, equal to the difference between total satisfaction and the actual payment. So here, a more precise measurement of the real cost payed for a trip comes to be very important, we therefore adopted the distance-based measurement in aims of gaining in measurement precision. We acknowledge certainly the potential problem with this standardized measurement of the travel cost, since people may consider the length of the travel in very heterogeneous way. We hope our combined methods based on random-effect estimation model for panel data to capture at least some part of this heterogeneity between people. We did the same estimation with the auto-reported expenditure data, but the results were statistically insignificant and very difficult to interpret. We also believe these unsatisfactory results can be explained by the potential omissions in the auto-reported trip related expenditure data that we observed in the previous section.