Putting price on the recreational value of waters

Finnish people like spending their holidays boating, or by a lake or the sea. There are also ways of putting a price on the recreational services provided by waters.

Lakes, rivers and the sea produce many benefits for humans. They provide water for drinking and watering crops as well as fish for us to eat. They offer boating routes and shipping lanes and many possibilities for recreation. No wonder people all over the world wish to live and spend their holidays close to water.

If the benefits created by aquatic environments can be identified and defined, they can also be accounted for in spatial planning and decision-making. Benefits expressed in monetary terms can be factored in when calculating the costs and advantages of different actions and plans relating to waters. This issue is complicated by the fact that most of the benefits generated by lakes, rivers and the sea are public goods that are freely available to everyone and have no market price.

The value of such public goods as possibilities for boating or swimming can be determined indirectly, however, and one way of doing this is so-called economic valuation. For example, this can be done by telling people about a planned improvement to a water area and asking how much they would be willing to pay for it. They can further be asked how much they value the current state of the water body, and its status after the planned improvement. The monetary benefit people will gain from the proposed change can be determined based on their answers.

The recreational value of a water body can also be determined on the basis of past behaviour. For example, changes in water quality can be compared to the development of shoreline property prices. Another possibility is estimating how much money people have spent on travel in order to enjoy recreation by a lake or the sea.