Public perspective on the environmental impacts of sea sand mining: Evidence from a choice experiment in South Korea

A project collecting a total of 24.3 million cubic meters of sea sand from the aggregate extraction complex in the exclusive economic zone of the South Sea in South Korea has been under way. The government needs information about the public perspective on the environmental impacts of the sea sand mining project. This paper attempts to examine the public perspective by employing a choice experiment (CE). The attributes chosen to represent the environmental impacts are an increase in coastal erosion, a decrease in benthos, a decrease in fish, and deterioration of the sea water quality, and the price attribute is the additional annual income tax per household. A total of 1000 interviewees were surveyed across the country through person-to-person interviews. A mixed logit model, which has the advantage of being able to reflect preference heterogeneity, was applied to estimating a utility function from the gathered CE data. All the coefficients for the attributes were estimated to be statistically significant. The environmental costs of a 1% increase in coastal erosion, a 1% decrease in benthos, a 1% decrease in fish, and a 1% deterioration in the sea water quality were KRW 100 (USD 0.09), 76 (0.07), 152 (0.14), and 123 (0.11), respectively, per household per year. Combining these results with the environmental impact assessment results for the project allows a quantitative assessment of the environmental costs of the project.