Estimating Socio-Cultural Services of Coastal Wetlands: A Case of Negombo Lagoon in Sri Lanka

Knowledge on social and cultural systems is essential for comprehensive understanding of ecosystem changes, monitoring biodiversity, development and implementation of resource management strategies. Social values of coastal landscapes reveal the attributes of locations and their relative importance for people. Aim of the study was to evaluate the cultural services and derive the monetary value of social landscape through valuing socio-cultural services of Negombo lagoon. A discrete choice experiment approach was used to estimate the individual’s preference towards social landscape by incorporating featured attributes. The individual preference was expressed through the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) by integrating a monetary attribute into choice sets. Thus, the MWTP or the implicit price of social landscape attributes included in the choice task was estimated and then the total social landscape value was derived as 13,055 LKR per monthly per household. The social landscape values of Negombo lagoon demonstrated the important ecological, and socio-cultural knowledge, which should be integrated as guiding policies in ecosystem conservation and management strategies. Further, the challenging management paradigm for coastal and marine landscape of Negombo lagoon, and associated services should contain not only the biological and physical benefits but also socio- cultural values too.