Managing urban ecological land as properties: Conceptual model, public perceptions, and willingness to pay

Rapid and large-scale urbanization can lead to the loss of ecological land and the degradation of ecosystem services. The effective management of urban ecological land is crucial to maintaining urban sustainability. In this study, we first categorized ecological land from two dimensions, i.e. its ecological function and social property. We then put forward a framework of managing the urban ecological land as a property. Dongying City in China was selected as our case to investigate public perception and willingness to pay (WTP) for managing urban ecological land. Our findings showed that 94.8%, 87.1%, and 97.7% of respondents supported improvements of ecological land management in residential, business, and public areas, respectively, indicating that there is a good public opinion base. For residential areas, the management of ecological land by collecting property charges from households is largely acceptable; for the management of the ecological land in business areas, the vast majority supports the enterprise or government funding; for public areas, the vast majority prefers the government funding. Our further analyses of the factors influencing WTP show that the transparency of information on property fees has a significant impact. We also found that higher income levels lead to a higher WTP for managing ecological land in residential areas, but not for business or public areas. Furthermore, neither higher awareness about pollution nor higher level of formal education significantly induces higher WTP. Our finding could provide an evidence-based reference for policy-making and the operational design of the management model that we proposed.