Weighing cultural legacies is crucial to better understand the opportunity costs of lagoon restoration. It may be necessary for local populations whose wellbeing and culture are closely linked to heritage. This paper investigates the preferences and willingness to pay WTP of local fishermen for contributing to the restoration of the Bizerte lagoon Tunisia, North Africa and the management of the Manzel Abderrahmen harbor through the implementation of the EcoPact project.
For this purpose, a discrete choice experiment DCE survey was conducted in the port with 50 local fishers. The results of this work represent a particular contribution to the literature as they offer a different perspective on the willingness to pay for the benefits of Cultural Bequest.
This suggests that decision-makers should be aware of the omitted legacy values that could influence subsequent decision-making. The economic values of ecosystem services must be assigned once people understand how needs and wants are affected by changes in those services Doherty et al. Marine ecosystems also provide a variety of ecological benefits that can be directly or indirectly converted into economic goods and services for humans Remoundou et al.
So, avoiding its degradation needs concrete answers based on socio-ecological economics Molinos-Senante et al. Recent investigations are giving more and more importance to cultural legacies when assessing ecosystem services. In another word, weighing cultural legacies is crucial to better understand the opportunity costs of lagoon restoration.
Since then, many studies have recently highlighted that cultural heritage has a direct impact on both social and local economic activities Legg et al. Cheng et al. However, the cultural values of the legacy associated with these ecosystems remain hardly explored in the literature Wright and Eppink, For example, in the case of marine and maritime ecosystems, trade-offs that incorporate cultural legacy values provide an essential lever to understand the opportunity costs of lagoon restoration better and may be relevant to local populations whose wellbeing and culture are closely linked to heritage Oleson et al.
