Estimating the welfare impacts of agricultural landscape change in Ireland: a choice experiment approach

In this paper we exploit a choice experiment modelling framework to estimate the potential non-market welfare impacts of a number of hypothetical rural Irish landscape types that could become real by the year 2030, depending both on future agricultural policy reform and changing land use demands. The results of a random parameters logit model demonstrate significant preference heterogeneity amongst the Irish population for the attributes of agricultural landscapes. The largest welfare gain for the population is found to be from the ‘agri-environmental landscape’ that protects traditional farm landscape features and enhances biodiversity.