How childhood nature experiences affect adults’ conservation choices.
If you visited a meadow frequently as a child, would you want more to live near a natural area as an adult? Perhaps you were in a nature club in primary school; would you be more likely to volunteer for conservation efforts once you had your own income? How much does early life experience with nature affect the value you place on nature as an adult ?
University of Illinois doctoral student Liqing Li started thinking about this question at the 2017 Heartland Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop. A speaker was talking about environmental justice: how poor minority populations often live in highly polluted areas, and the next generation follows that pattern due to income constraints. Liqing wondered, “What if your childhood experience also affects your preference for the type of neighborhood or environment where you live? Would that also affect people’s willingness to pay for environmental protection around them?”
Having experiences with nature can help people build up nature-related “amenity capital”. People with such capital may gain higher utility from nature in their later stage of lives. “Think about it. If you live in an environment as a child with access to natural areas, you get many chances to be involved in nature. You may have more attachment to nature, and you have skills and knowledge that help you enjoy nature more. So, as an adult, you may end up being willing to pay more for environmental conservation,” Liqing explains.
To get some answers, Liqing and her co-author, CEOS researcher Amy Ando, designed a research study that would test whether someone’s childhood nature experiences affect their willingness to pay for grasslands conservation management in in the Midwest. Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota are all places that used to have lots of grassland, but now much of it is gone. Government and conservation agencies are trying to restore grasslands, but they need more insight into the features that people care most about for this type of area so they can decide how to deploy funding and other resources to protect and restore grasslands.
A CEOS Student Research Mini-Grant helped fund Liqing’s choice-experiment survey, from which she received 1,018 responses from individuals in Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. The online survey presented several features of a hypothetically restored grassland 40 miles from the respondent’s home. The survey included recreational activities and environmental services. For example, the survey presented a choice between different combinations of birds, camping, hiking, fishing features, and cost, then required respondents to indicate which bundle of features they would prefer. Besides demographics, Liqing also collected information on respondents’ childhood experiences before the age of 13, such as their participation in environmental education, birdwatching, and camping to get an idea of how those experiences affect their responses.
While still a work in progress, preliminary results from analyzing the survey indicate that childhood experience does matter. For example, people who frequently visited grasslands and people who lived near grasslands in their early lives appear willing to pay $6.5 and $8.5 more per year respectively for some form of grassland restoration. Those that received environmental education as youth are willing to pay around $12 more per year for restoration.
Liqing’s research is finding that people do place higher value on conservation and restoration when they have experiences with nature as youth. If urbanization limits how much people live near and interact with nature in their early lives, that may undermine future public demand for conservation with a time-lagged negative feedback loop between urbanization and support for conservation.
Programs facilitating nature-related activities for children could interrupt that feedback loop. Amenity capital can be built with education when children do not live near nature or have little family-driven nature experience.
If people in poor and minority groups live in neighborhoods with fewer green spaces in their childhood because of budget constraints and structural racism in housing markets, they may be less willing to pay a premium to live near nature as adults even if budget constraints and racist barriers to mobility were relaxed. Scholars of environmental justice could further explore whether this kind of feedback really does play a role in entrenching patterns of unjust access to nature in the U.S.
This research shows that restoration of tallgrass prairies in the Midwest may yield large benefits to people in that region today; early results show people benefiting from $323 million to $639 million per year from having a grassland restored nearby. Liqing’s work implies that those grasslands could also contribute to increased amenity capital among children living there today, enabling them to glean more value from nature throughout their lives.
