| Abstract: | Awash National Park is one of nature-based recreational sites in Ethiopia for its impressive landscape and diversity of fauna. However, the park has been in danger due to heavy settlement by farmers, declining numbers of wildlife population, widespread deforestation and continuous reduction in recreational qualities of the site. Due to this, the park has been unable to improve the qualities of ecotourism experience and expand the types and variety of its recreational services for a long time because of lack of sustainable income from internal sources. Moreover, the value of the park in terms of its recreational service to the society is not known. Thus, there is a need for valuation of the park to know how much value the people attach to the park so as to demonstrate how the park managers can extract revenue by improving the qualities of the national park and by expanding the types and variety of the services. These can in turn enable to establish a sustainable and efficient level of operations for the maintenance of the park. Thus, to attach quantitative estimates to the on-site recreational benefit of the park, the study applied two standard procedures of Environmental Economics, i.e. travel cost and choice experiment methods, using primary data collected from a survey of 195 on-site visitors at the park. By applying the Travel Cost Method, the aggregate annual recreational economic benefit gained from visitors of the park was estimated to be ETB 4,987,965.14 out of which the site authority captured only about 12.1% of the true economic recreational benefit of the park. On the other hand, by applying the Choice Experiment Method, the finding indicated that all the attributes (namely; wildlife population, afforestation and additional service to visitors and one monetary attribute, gate fee) were significant factors in affecting the probability of choosing an improvement scenario. Generally, while the results of this study indicates the conservative estimate of the economic value of recreation benefit from the site is very big, it has also indicated that the domestic recreation demand to the park is high.
Therefore, it can be suggested that alleviating the major problems that reduce the quality of the park and supporting improvement and expansion projects by extracting revenue out of the excess benefit are essential. |
