Small Hydropower Ecosystem Service Value Assessment

Electric power is a basic for the sustainable development of a national economy. With the continuous developing of Chinese society and economy, the demand for electric power is increasing rapidly. As the clean, non-pollution, recycling utilized energy, small hydropower is an essential parts of Chinese strategy of continuous development. China offered a series of preferential policies on the different development periods of the small hydropower and the development of small hydropower had achieved outstanding accomplishment. Due to the absence of the social benefit and ecological benefit assessment in the economic assessment of the small hydropower, the netting electrovalence is irrational, the operation and maintenance on the small hydropower becomes difficult, and it will cause the lack of competitive ablility in the electricity market. As a result, it is very important in theory an practice to study how to assess the social benefit and ecological benefit of the small hydropower accurately.At present, there are many researchs on the assessment of the small hydropower's social benefit and ecological benefit in China, unfortunately, most of them are descriptive and qualitative analysis. In addition, because of the diffculty in data collection, researchers only can assess the use value of the ecological benefit from the perspective of power suppliers, none of them assess the benefit of the small hydropower from the demand side. Based on the evaluation of small hydropower's social benefit and ecological benefit, this paper will attempt to assess the ecosystem service value of the small hydropower from the demand side or the micro aspect. By using the contingent valuation method (CVM) ,one of the most widely used method in the word. In the CVM, we can inquiry the willingness to pay (WTP) of the people who can enjoy the ecosystem service of the small hydropower directly, then we can obtain the ecosystem service value of the small hydropower including the non-use value.The total value we assess contains the ecological benefit and a part of the social benefit of the small hydropower.In this paper, we first introduce some basic concept and connotation, for instance, small hydropower, ecosystem service, et al. Then we summarize the recent development on the assessment of the small hydropower's social benefit and ecological benefit in China, and the advances of research on the ecosystem service value. Especially, we review the application of CVM in the evaluation of the ecosystem service value at home and abroad, the theory and the application method of CVM.We find the absence of the social benefit and ecological benefit assessment in small hydropower and the advantages of using CVM assess the non-use value. Based on a literature review, we use the DC-CVM questionnaire to inquiry the willingness to pay of 647 people who live in the rural and city of the Tongjiqiao Small Hydropower's surrounding area, after a descriptive analysis of the mirco data, the binary Logit model is utilized to analyze the influencing factors of the willingness to pay, the cumulative Logit model is also employed to analyze the the influencing factors of ability to pay among the people who has the positive WTP. At last, we obtain the mean WTP and it's confidence intervals.The basic conclusion of the theiss is as follows: CVM has advantages in the measurement of ecosystem service value and other non-market products or service, especially assessing the non-use value, which is a big proportion in the total value. The factors such as region of the people, with historical voluntary donation behaviors, family's attributes, professional, age, family annual income, comprehension degree of the ecosystem service function and cognitive attitude of protecting the Tongjiqiao reservoir's ecological environment have significant influence to the willingness to pay of the people. The factors such as region of the people, with historical voluntary donation behaviors, family's attributes, the initial bid of the DC-CVM, family annual income, education degree, comprehension degree of the ecosystem service function and the total satisfaction of the Tongjiqiao reservoir's ecosystem service have significant influence to the ability to pay of the people who have positive WTP. The annual mean willingness to pay of single-bounded CVM and double-bounded CVM estimation are 141.05, 219.52Yuan/a, respectively. Furthermore, the 95% confidence interval of annual mean willingness to pay estimated by the two questionnaire formats are 118.47-166.79, 204.41-236.22Yuan/a, respectively. In contrast, double-bounded model could obtain much more information of willingness to pay of the person investigated, thus reducing confidence interval of estimation, and enhancing the estimation accuracy of the greatest willingness to pay. According to the estimated mean WTP of the double-bounded CVM, the total ecosystem service value of the Tongjiqiao reservoir is 15 millions and 540 thousands Yuan.In order to promote the healthy development of the small hydropower, the government could strengthen leadership from the following aspects: first, strengthen the supervision of the exploitation of small hydropower, maintain the reasonable and ordered exploitation of small hydropower; second, perfect the assessment system of the resource and environment value by developing the small hydropower, expedite the establishment of the ecological compensation system; third, promote the economic development, aggrandize the propaganda of the environmental protection; fourth, people's participation level in the related policies making, improve the transparency of policies.