Willingness to pay for ecosystem benefits of green stormwater infrastructure in Chinese sponge cities

Globally, green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has been adopted to address urban flash flooding and stormwater pollution and provide additional ecosystem benefits such as recreation, education, and aesthetics to urban communities. However, there has been a lack of research on people's preferences for different ecosystem benefits, making it challenging to understand synergies and trade-offs among co-benefits and optimize GSI planning and design. Additionally, urban stormwater management programs commonly face long-term financial challenges, demanding research that investigates the feasibility of public utility programs. This study fills these gaps in a Chinese context by employing a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to compare public preferences and estimate the monetary values of four GSI benefits, including stormwater quantity and quality treatment, educational benefit, aesthetics, and recreational benefits, in four small-to-medium pilot sponge cities. Results show that respondents preferred some kinds of GSI programs to a conventional lawn space in their living environments, and they had significant willingness to pay (WTP) for GSI programs to obtain educational ($14.8 per household per year, p