Valuing coastal wetland restoration in Australia with discrete choice experiments

Coastal wetlands, including mangroves, tidal marshes, and seagrasses, are critical ecosystems that deliver ecological and socioeconomic benefits such as wildlife habitat, water filtration, coastal protection and carbon sequestration. This study employs a discrete choice experiment to estimate the value Australians place on the restoration of these ecosystems at a national scale. There are challenges in framing ecosystem restoration scenarios at a national scale compared to the more common local case study focus, as it is difficult to make national level scenarios relevant and consequential to respondents. To address the potential for bias through inflated responses, we employ two complementary approaches: a pre-experiment question gauging respondents' likelihood of supporting restoration improvements, and a post-experiment debrief probing their reasons for supporting particular options.