Assessing Willingness to Accept Compensation and Willingness to Pay for Kipkunur Forest Ecosystem Conservation in Elgeyo Marakwet County, Kenya

Public forests provide a variety of goods and services to communities whose opportunity cost is related to the value of alternative goods and services. This study sought to assess expressed conservation value of Kipkunur forests stock flow among economic units using expressed willingness to accept compensation and to pay. In order to account for forest goods and ecosystem services, information sought on forest resources was obtained from households living near the forest. Structured questionnaires were designed for the upstream and downstream households. In administering questionnaires, a systematic random sampling technique was employed and total samples of 224 and 231 for upstream and downstream households were selected, respectively. Excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version-20) was used in analysis. From the results, there were more females than males in upstream than downstream and more males in downstream than females with the mean age of respondents being 44.47 and 43.42 years, respectively. Again, both study areas depicted mean households’ size of 6 persons. Major economic activity for upstream was agriculture, while for downstream were depended on formal jobs and entrepreneurial ventures owed to high education level among households heads. Further, study results showed upstream households expressed high conservation value for the selected forest attributes of fuelwood, water supply, food supply and biodiversity than downstream forests resources, which was seen to be influenced by satiation effect. In conclusion, existences of variation on expressed willingness to conserve for specific forest attributes was influenced by satiation effect. It is recommended for the formulation of policy incentives that corrects redistribution imbalance in resources conservation among economic units in order to reflect Kaldor-Hicks compensation tests.