Estimating potential impacts of a change in river quality on the tourism value of Kruger National Park: An application of travel cost, contingent andconjoint valuation methods

Development and resource allocation decision processes are increasingly und er pressure to take environmental values into account in order to reach opt imal economic outcomes. In South Africa new techniques will be needed to in corporate environmental values into environmental impact assessment and in the allocation of water resources under the new National Water Act (1908), both of which require the comparison of alternative scenarios with varying impacts on the environment, This study on the tourism value of rivers in-th e Crocodile Catchment is the first case study to develop methods for incorp orating the economic values of the goods and services provided by functioni ng aquatic ecosystems into such decision processes. Rivers within the Kruge r National Park (KNP) will be affected by water usage in the portions of th eir catchment areas upstream of the park boundary. The current tourism valu e of these rivers was considered in terms of revenues to KNP (visitors' on- site expenditure), contribution to the economy (visitors' on-site and off-s ite expenditure) and recreational value, including consumers' surplus. The effect of a change in river quality was determined using a joint contingent valuation - conjoint valuation approach, whereby respondents rated four di fferent scenarios, each containing four attributes at four different levels . It was estimated that the current value of KNP tourism is about R136 m. i n terms of on-site expenditure, R267 in. in terms of economic impact, or al l expenditure related to visiting the park, and R1 bn in terms; of consumer s' surplus, The latter two values can be added to calculate total recreatio nal value. Four methods were used to isolate the value of rivers front the total tourism value stated above, and all yielded similar values of about 3 0% of the total. This implies that about 30% of tourism business would be l ost if rivers were totally degraded. Thus, rivers within the Crocodile Catc hment, which takes 22% of KNP visitor-nights, contribute R9 in. to KNP reve nues and have a total annual recreational use value of about R85 ro., inclu ding off-site expenditure and consumers' surplus. The conjoint analysis gen erated an equation which is able to predict the change in trip expenditure, or total KNP revenue, associated with changes in levels of any of the four attributes considered. Appearance of the riverscape has the greatest influ ence on recreational use value, followed by waterbird diversity, aquatic me gafauna and riparian tree density. Such models can be used in water allocat ion decision processes when attribute levels associated with alternative ma nagement scenarios are predicted by aquatic ecologists.