Willingness to pay for sustainable and legal firewood in Tasmania

Illegal firewood collection has a series of unintended environmental, economic, and public safety impacts associated with harvesting undermining the development of a sustainable firewood industry. In this paper, we present Tasmanian firewood consumers with a labelling system and explore their willingness to pay for labelled firewood. We employ a discrete choice experiment with 239 potential firewood consumers. We estimate consumers' willingness to pay for different sources of firewood, coming from different distances, and whether it is important for a share of the proceeds to be invested in social or environmental priorities. To account for preference heterogeneity, we estimate a two-class latent class model and mixed multinomial logit model. The results from the first class of the latent class model and mixed multinomial logit model suggest that consumers are willing to pay a premium for repurposed wood, firewood sourced from agroforestry-based operations, proceeds invested in wildlife conservation, or the firewood comes from sites closer to their residence. The second class from the latent class model is characterized by consumers who are concerned only with the cost. Our survey respondents prefer their firewood to be accredited and regulated by independent non - profit bodies such as the Firewood Association of Australia.

Automated summary

This paper presents a study on Tasmanian firewood consumers' willingness to pay for labelled firewood. The results show that consumers are willing to pay a premium for repurposed wood, firewood sourced from agroforestry-based operations, proceeds invested in wildlife conservation, or firewood that comes from sites closer to their residence. Additionally, consumers prefer their firewood to be accredited and regulated by independent non-profit bodies such as the Firewood Association of Australia.