Improving navigability on the Kromme River Estuary: A choice experiment application

Navigation of estuaries is a vitally important aspect of boating recreation in South Africa and elsewhere. This paper uses a choice experiment to estimate recreation values of the Kromme River Estuary, a popular estuary along South Africa's east coast. This valuation methodology allows for the identification of preferred management strategies through the tradeoffs made by estuarine recreational users. It is found that the level of navigability is the most important predictor of user choice, and argued that more attention needs to be paid to options for improving navigability and methods to fund these interventions. It is concluded that an increase in licence fee of ZAR402 would improve recreational value. Keywords: estuary, recreational attributes, navigability, choice experiment, willingness-to-pay, conditional logit model, random parameters logit model