Households’ Willingness to Pay for Improved Watershed Services of the Layawan Watershed in Oroquieta City, Philippines

Watersheds provide numerous ecosystem services to downstream communities often with no cost to them.Although these services are valuable to humans, they do not have monetary values attached to them, makingtheir total economic value quite ambiguous. This ambiguity results in the non-optimal use of the naturalresources that leads to the degradation of the watersheds. One approach that could address this issue is paymentsfor ecological services (PES). The main objective of this study was to estimate the willingness-to-pay forimproved watershed services by domestic water users within the Layawan Watershed in Oroquieta City. Itemployed the contingent valuation method to assess the willingness to pay of water users. More than 50% of therespondents voted positively to the referendum question which is whether they are willing to pay a certainamount for the conservation of the Layawan Watershed or not. The computed mean willingness to pay amountswere Php 57.48 and Php 53.89 per month per household for the parametric and non-parametric estimations,respectively. These amounts translate to 0.68% of the average monthly household income of the samplerespondents, which is approximately Php 8 198.84. The amounts computed may serve as bases for a water userfee that may be collected from the domestic water users in the Layawan Watershed as buyers of the watershedservices.