Economic Value of Recreation as an Ecosystem Service in Ayer Keroh Recreational Forest, Malaysia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 TOTAL ECONOMIC VALUE OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES IN 2 A RECREATIONAL FOREST

This study has not accounted economic values of habitat services and cultural and amenity services. Therefore the term “total economic value” can be considered inappropriate.

The meaning of US$36,986/ha/year figure is not clear.

The figure US$33,280/ha/year for regulating services (carbon sequestration) cannot be trusted. No study in my knowledge estimated such figure. If the authors do not validate the figure with other study and carbon market price, I strongly reject to publish this manuscript.

 The language of the abstract section is scientifically very poor standard. I suggest not to use the word “like” as used here. The abstract writing in the following style would make readers more appealing.

Abstract: Economic values of various ecosystem services of forests managed with special purpose are not well understood in many countries including Malaysia. Policy makers and resource managers with lack of such information may make inappropriate decisions to manage the forest resources. To address the information problem, this study used both primary and secondary sources of data and estimated economic values of various ecosystems services of Ayer Keroh Recreational Forest (AKRF) in Malaysia. This study also used the allometric equations and carbon price to value the regulating services (climate regulation through carbon sequestration) and the Travel Cost Method (TCM) for provisioning service including recreation. It estimated US$2,888,566/year total economic value (TEV) of recreational and carbon sequestration services.  The study estimated US$20,346/ha/year) for provisioning services including recreation and US$33,280/ha/year for regulating services (constituting of carbon sequestration. The value of carbon sequestration economic benefit is enormous though the forest managed for recreation. The finding indicates society can benefit significantly from multiple ecosystems services even if a forest is established for a single purpose.

Introduction

He following sentence is unclear However, these two methods only provide policymakers with infor mation about the non-market value of the recreational forest, thus ignoring the market 58 values of the recreational forest (Matthew et al., 2020).

The following concluding sentence is supposed to at the end of the next paragraph.  

This bias results in underestimating 59 TEV.

Many advance studies on recreational and other ecosystems services are done in the world. You summarized some of them in the first table. Your following concluding sentences for the paragraph ranging from line 65 to 80 is misleading. I advise to drop them. I advise to state that “there are ranges of studies in total economic values as shown in the table ??. But such detail studies on ecosystems services specially managed for recreations are sparse in Malaysia”.  This statement is enough here.   

Method section.

I suggest displaying a table showing personal travel cost calculation.

Your writing indicated you are not much familiar with economic valuation methods including travel cost. I suggest writing many justification to use travel cost methods. This way you can hide your weaknesses.

The value of recreational visit is seems too high. Visitors may not have spent Rm 71 to travel just only the forest. The trip may for multipurpose or visiting many other things. There are many studies how to calculate the travel costs when people do visit for multipurpose. Please follow them.

There may be many problems on estimating carbon value. Buyer pay to the carbon quantity just once, not every year even if the carbon remains in the forest. The carbon credit or amount sold previous are liability that need to be kept in the forest forever. Payment for next years or time is just for incremental amount.

Results

You have written too many things and specially justification with references. It has made the section too voluminous and suspicious on quality of study. This is an empirical study, not review study. Therefore, I advise you to limit your result presentation only on your figures and validation with a few studies.

The result interpretations are confusing whether they are estimated on total forest basis or per hectare basis.

Over all:

a. write with simple sentence.

b. Avoid too many justifications.

c. Include only essential points and figures

d. Check error in methods and parameters.

Author Response

Respected reviewer, firstly we thank you for all the comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript.

***Please note that the manuscript is in track changes mode to enable you to view directly the changes made. Hence to view full changes: Go to track changes click at (All markup), meanwhile click (simple markup) to view clearer copy.

With limited time along with busy schedule we have tried the best to address them. 

Regarding the comment on proofreading, for your info, we  have spent almost RM 2000 for editing purposes. We did submitted to a native speaker. Our apology if the paper does not yet fulfil the language requirement, surely once its confirmed accepted we shall work on it again if it requires further touch up.

We humbly look forward to get this paper accepted. 

Thanks a million

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General Comments to Authors

1. The authors have been mentioning Total Economic Value (TEV), however, in reality, the TEV concept has neither been adequately discussed in the literature nor, truly and fully applied in the study.
2. Since TEV has not been properly conducted, it is advisable the title should read “Economic Value of Ecosystem Services in Recreational Forest.
3. The authors need to explain the concept of TEV in terms of direct use, indirect use, option value, existence value and bequest value, and how all these values are determined or estimated from the present study?
4. TEV comprised of the summation of all the value types of given resources (TEV=Use [direct and indirect use value +None-Use).
5. The literature is inadequate, especially related to valuation techniques and the justification for choosing the TCM as a preferred method.
6. No literature about value type where use and non-use value are clearly distinguished. The theoretical underpinning has not been explained .
7. The author(s) need to understand the concept of Total Economic Value (TEV) very clear before applying it in the study, as it has been mentioned severally in the study.
8. Is the issue of land use change in the recreational forest part of the study objective? Why is it that land use change have not appear anywhere in the title, abstract, key words, or literature but suddenly appeared in methodology?
9. Under reliability analysis, what are the labels for the items B1, B2, B3…….? What are their scales of measurement? Likert scale or continuous? Was the instrument developed, adopt or adapt?
10. In methodology, the authors need improve by stating questionnaire administered, return rate, valid questionnaires used for the final analysis. Also, there is need to
11. In page 16, line 441, the authors mentioned about consumer surplus and Total economic value. Are they the same as portrayed there? If different can they be separated?
12. Table 8. need to be more comprehensive. All the values has to be estimated before TEV can achieved. Estimation of only two value types does not guarantee the estimation of TEV.
13. The authors need to clearly highlight the contribution of their work to the advancement of knowledge on economic valuation. In what way is the study novel and relevant for policy decision? Conclusion all recommendation should be based on the study outcome especially where the study objectives are clearly addressed.

Author Response

Respected reviewer, firstly we thank you for all the comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript.

***Please note that the manuscript is in track changes mode to enable you to view directly the changes made. Hence to view full changes: Go to track changes click at (All markup), meanwhile click (simple markup) to view clearer copy.

With limited time along with busy schedule we have tried the best to address them. 

Regarding the comment on proofreading, for your info, we  have spent almost RM 2000 for editing purposes. We did submitted to a native speaker. Our apology if the paper does not yet fulfil the language requirement, surely once its confirmed accepted we shall work on it again if it requires further touch up.

We humbly look forward to get this paper accepted. 

Thanks a million

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am an environmental economist and therefore, I can give recommendations and comments principally to the economic parts of the paper.

The topic is very interesting and novel related to the Asian region, mostly in Malaysia. So, it would be important to publish it.

At the same time in its present form the article is quite rough-and-ready.

Some conceptual comments:

• There are a lot of maps in Chapter 2.1. about the area from 2010 to 2020, and a table with the areas of the different habitats. They are unnecessary, firstly because there were no significant changes, secondly, because the paper is a bit long. I would put only the table and a map about the current situation into this chapter.
• The paper does not have a real focus.
• The usage of the concept of Total Economic Value is also unnecessary because the values of different ecosystem services examined here cannot be added because two different methods were used to evaluate them based on different economic assumptions. The authors examine only two ecosystem services (ES), the carbon sequestration and recreational services, instead of the total economic value of the area. Therefore, using this term is also misleading. At the end of the paper the authors mentioned that they did not estimate the value of cultural services – I have to say that recreation belongs to the cultural services.
• It would be better if the paper concentrated on explicitly one of the two ES. In my opinion the more interesting part of this research is the recreational services of the area, and the travel cost method used. The price of the unit of carbon sequestration is not well founded, it is based only some results from the literature, and the reader does not understand why it is 10 USD/ha. This is the reason why I would skip the examination of carbon sequestration.
• Its structure is a bit confused. The literature review should focus on the concept of ecosystem services and the detailed methodology of TCM.
• I would separate the biological part from the economic one.

Some detailed suggestions about TCM:

• The authors should clarify the meanings of the different independent variables. For example, we don’t know what ’education level of individuals’ means, what the unit is? And there is no table about the descriptive statistics of the variables.
• Some logical steps are missing, e.g. I couldn’t understand where the total values of living components and non-living components come from.
• The details of the survey are not introduced properly. There is no information about
  • how the multipurpose travels were treated, or
  • how many people were interviewed from the same car?
• It is not clear whether the data of the dependent variable came only from the survey or there are other data sources as well, because in Table 8 the authors wrote: „Dependent Variable: Number of visits in the past eight months from September 2020”, which was more than 90 thousands, but the sample size was about 400.

The English of the article should be improved.

The reviewer’s opinion is that the paper needs to be thoroughly reworked, restructured, and rewritten.

Author Response

Respected reviewer, firstly we thank you for all the comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript.

***Please note that the manuscript is in track changes mode to enable you to view directly the changes made. Hence to view full changes: Go to track changes click at (All markup), meanwhile click (simple markup) to view clearer copy.

With limited time along with busy schedule we have tried the best to address them. 

Regarding the comment on proofreading, for your info, we  have spent almost RM 2000 for editing purposes. We did submitted to a native speaker. Our apology if the paper does not yet fulfil the language requirement, surely once its confirmed accepted we shall work on it again if it requires further touch up.

We humbly look forward to get this paper accepted. 

Thanks a million

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

      Generally the paper is focused on the issue of critical importance. But  it needs improvement, including addressing the issues:

1. Not clear which from available international classifications of ecosystem services used in this study.
2. Line 61 – “In contrast, non-market values were based on cultural services recreation and recreational hunting”. Hunting or recreational hunting was never mentioned in paper again. The sense of this sentence is unclear et al.
3. In the Table xxx: Summary of literature review on TEV the meaning “type of establishment” is not very clear – may be it can be subdivided on “ownership” and “protected status”. Also in this table instead of “not sure” it should be clearly stated available information or not available.
4. The column “type of establishment” contains the measurement unit “Ha/year values” but provided information from different studies is not unified – like US$16 million per year – it is not per ha? Also using different currencies makes this information non-comparable.
5. Line 120 – «Park ..... currently protected from any development and resource-extraction exploitation. To keep it protected and less vulnerable to development pressure and economic valuation of the park would be beneficial” – any arguments for this statement? How it became protected? What changes in conservation status or regime?
6. Line 146 – “In this study per se, we concentrated only on the forested habitats amounting at (78.10) ha”. What is  “forested habitats” ? “Forested” means afforestation or reforestation? Why it’s called “habitat” not just “forest” – “planted forest “ or “natural forest” ?
7. Table 2 is named Land use classes. I would call it “Land use type” . Why to duplicate the years in title of the table and in table again?
8. The results are not compared with other studies – at least just generally. Which reason was then to collect the data for table Table xxx: Summary of literature review?
9. Of course it makes some sense to observe the land use changes (Figures 4,5,6) but it is not the main point of this publication.
10. There are just Conclusions – Discussion on the paper contribution to previous studies is missing
11. At the same time the methodology (scheme with structure of  methods used ?) and results (some diagram for example)  are not visualized et all

Author Response

Respected reviewer, firstly we thank you for all the comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript.

***Please note that the manuscript is in track changes mode to enable you to view directly the changes made. Hence to view full changes: Go to track changes click at (All markup), meanwhile click (simple markup) to view clearer copy.

With limited time along with busy schedule we have tried the best to address them. 

Regarding the comment on proofreading, for your info, we  have spent almost RM 2000 for editing purposes. We did submitted to a native speaker. Our apology if the paper does not yet fulfil the language requirement, surely once its confirmed accepted we shall work on it again if it requires further touch up.

We humbly look forward to get this paper accepted. 

Thanks a million

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I still found a critical problem on method and result of calculating carbon/ climate service benefit payment. Please read the reviewers not clearly and address accordingly.

449.80 Mg is the total carbon stock per hectare, not annual growth rate. The annual growth rate of the carbon stock varies with age (see Omar, H., & Misman, M. A. (2018) for Malaysian case) . According to the carbon payment policy, the landholder gets a lump sum amount of money based on existing carbon stock. The additionality is based on annual addition on the carbon stock.  Therefore, the 449.80 Mg carbon stock of the forest does not get carbon payment each year. Therefore, it is wrong to claim $4498.00/ ha/year income of the forest carbon. You are required to make different calculation to get annual income of the carbon / climate service. Omar, H., & Misman, M. A. (2018)  may help in this calculation. Please read reliable  literature to calculate correctly.   I also advise to read about carbon stock permanency/ guarantee to make the climate change mitigation forever.     2. The writters presented too much information in this paper and made complex to present. The too much information indicates this paper is based on a student thesis. They are not essential here. Deleting some tables can make the paper professional looking.  3. Too much edited stuffs made reader and reviewers difficult to read and understand you writing. In next time, please submit clean document without showing the corrections.  4. I suggest to change the black background of the pie charts.   What is carbon stock additionality: At its most basic, additionality asks, ‘is the carbon generated from a forest carbon project additional or would it have happened absent the particular program or intervention?’  If it would have happened, regardless of whether the program existed or not, then the carbon arising is not additional – it is coincidental.  If, on the other hand, the impact would not have happened but for the program, then the impact can be called additional. . Te annual rate of carbon sequestration in dipterocarps forests was estimated to be approximately 3  Mg C ha−1 year−1 (or 6.4  Mg  ha−1 year−1 of AGB) Omar, H., & Misman, M. A. (2018). Time-series maps of aboveground biomass in dipterocarps forests of Malaysia from PALSAR and PALSAR-2 polarimetric data. Carbon balance and management, 13(1), 19. reading material about additionality
World Bank. 2016. “Carbon Credits and Additionality: Past, Present, and Future.”

Author Response

Respected reviewer, We thank you for all your comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The author(s) may recheck about the recency of some citations. Also, in the title, the name of the study location is absent, making it to look very broad and more of a review article. 

The Title would be better if it  reads " Economic Valaue of Ecosystem Services  in Ayer Keroh Recreational Forest, Malaysia"

Author Response

Respected reviewer, thank you for all the comments and suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper improved significantly. Just some comments:

The words " forests managed with special purpose " at the first sentence of abstract are to general, better to say about "recreational forests"

Also it will be good yo add in the Discussion  what we learned from this study for international readers because it's always mentioned that it's important for Malaysia - at the local and national level

Author Response

Respected reviewer, thank you for all the comments and suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

I have still a reservation to recommend the manuscript for publishing. The  economic value information published in the journal should be credible. Based on the carbon benefit calculating for climate regulative service, the authors seems unaware of how the carbon market trade or make payment for carbon service.

I would like to repeat that forest carbon credit sell is a  complex business. Mostly a carbon credit buyer do not pay you for same stock of carbon every year.  You may get only for annual incremental amount every year. The carbon liability must be considered to determine the economic value of the sequestrated carbon. To get carbon value US$ 4498 per ha per year,  the Ayer Keroh Recreational Forest  requires sequestrating forest carbon 449.8 ton per ha per year additional (annual increment) on existing stock. The annual increment of that amount is impossible based on the following literature and my work experience. Raihan, A.; Begum, R.A.; Mohd Said, M.N.; Pereira, J.J. Assessment of Carbon Stock in Forest Biomass and Emission Reduction Potential in Malaysia. Forests 2021, 12, 1294.

In Malaysia, average annual per ha production of rice  is 3770 kg. If per kg is priced US $ 0.44 , the rice income per ha will be less than US$1800. If the farmer get US$4498 per ha per year from the forest why they would plant the rice in their field? It implies something wrong in forest carbon valuation method. 

The above literature stated annual incremental economic value is US$ 83 ton per ha per year. The increment also depends on age of forest. Carbon payment depends on risk of deforestation. The risk of deforestation in AKRF is low. 

 The authors should clarify  the method how the forest carbon stock are treated while determining the economic values of climate regulation service. I advise the authors to contact experts/ business people who do forest carbon credit trading to estimate the carbon service payment. Some authors of the above publication can be a source of contact. You may also get such information from CIFOR. 

Author Response

Respected reviewer,

As per your suggestions i have contacted Dr Asif Raihan. I attach the details of our conversation. I thank him for his kindness to response to me. In overall, in the last email 

(Maybe you have to clarify in your paper what you mean by "carbon per hectare" and "carbon per hectare per year".)

Its more towards clarification,

I would like to indicate here that i have published papers on carbon stock and  carbon value studies:

1) The total economic value of forest ecosystem services in the tropical forests of Malaysia Valeur économique totale des services d'écosystèmes forestiers dans les forêts tropicales de Malaisie

2) Carbon Stock and Sequestration Valuation in a Mixed Dipterocarp Forest of Malaysia

I humbly look forward for your cooperation to make this thing smooth

Thank you in advance 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript requires improvement in the overall statement of its research question (as well as better writing). Stating that "there are minimal studies studied on the TEV of recreational forests per se (pg 2)" or that the deputy director of a forest department said that there are no such studies at one particular forest is not an appropriate justification. The research applies exisiting approaches and methodologies to one case study.

Writing should be more rigorous, avoiding meaningless statements such as "AKRF is a tranquil haven for wildlife" (pg 3) or "The park has been vulnerable to development pressure due to being in a strategic place" (pg 5): strategic for what? A thorough revision of English language is also necessary. Sometimes, future tense in unappropriately used.

In the description of the study site (section 2.1), it is not clear if the authors performed land use classification themselves. If they did, maps and other results would be better placed in the Results section, not in the Methods section.

The choice of the carbon price (pg 8) does not seem to be soundly grounded. References from 2007 and 2012 are cited, but the authors to go on to (apparently arbitrarily) setting a low and a high limit for their calculations, "by considering other estimations".

There seems to be an ambiguous application of concepts. While the recreational value of a forest can be described as direct use value, in ecosystem services terminology, they are labelled cultural services, not provisioning services (pg 24).

Other points that should be addressed if the manuscript is resubmitted:

- The abstract should specify in which country the study area is located and inform the TEV also in US dollars.

- In its first mention, the acronym AKRF (pg 2) should be explained.

- Water streams, lakes, buildings, open area/bare areas are normally named land use classes, not land use specifications (pg 3).

- The source of figures 1, 2 and 3 and table 1 cannot be ArcGIS. ArcGIS is a software, data is input by the user and the output is a map. Are they referencing the source of data? Did they prepare the map by themselves?

- Aren't there more recent allometric equations to estimate carbon storage? What is Wt in equation 4 and what is its unit? Exactly from what source does equation 5 come from?

- What is the CPI index (pg 9)? The exact meaning of watershed services should be explained. Is it the value of water provisioning services?

The manuscript is not publishable in its current state and requires a major revision.

Author Response

Thank you so much for the fruitful comments and suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript title: Total economic value of ecosystems services in recreational forest   The manuscript has many improvement areas to make it a publishable standard. The following are my suggestions for its improvement. 1. In the abstract section, I found some important information missing. The gross value alone gives little meaningful information. A scientifically standard and meaningful method to report the economic value is per hectare basis.  Reporting percentage share of individual services on total economic value would help forest managers to improve its management based on the preferences of the forest users. Methods applied to estimate values of individual ecosystems services are also missing in the abstract.   The following information may make the abstract more meaningful.   Values to make maximum use of  a multitude of ecosystem services including recreation of public forest are increasing. Individual and total economic values of the forest services based on situations of production site is still poorly understood in many countries including Malaysia. This study applied a market based method for wood and carbon service, ?? ?/, and travel cost method for recreational service and estimated the individual and total economic values of a forest local in a city adjoining to a World Heritage site. The economic value of  the individual services respectively were RM x/ ha (equivalent US$ x/ha), ..., ... and RM x/ ha (equivalent US$ x/ha). The total economic value was RM x/ha. This study implied that non recreational economic value of urban recreation forest would be x% of total economic value.   2. In the introduction section, you missed many important information  and included trivial important information.  You spent most of your space explaining the importance of total economic value which was supposed to be limited in the opening part of the first paragraph. You could write them as follows. [ Forests provide a multitude of ecosystem services. The values of the services vary with local conditions. Maximum use of forest services requires policy decision makers and forest managers an understanding of individual and total economic values of the forest services based on the situation of production site and principle uses.  Such values are sparsely estimated for many kinds of forests and especially in Malaysia. This study aims at estimating the individual and total economic values of a forest located in an urban setting. ].   You attempted to provide a brief account of the current state of knowledge in the first part of the last paragraph of the introduction section. But the review is not complete. You require firstly stating total economic value x/ ha in different purposes of forests: recreational, biodiversity conservation, production and amenity. Then you require stating the share of recreational value in total economic values.  Based on this review information, you can identify under or little studied issues and justify your study. In global , if not Malaysian context. I advise you to state the research question that your study answered.    Limitaion: You have estimate economic values of main services but not of all such as food/fruit value, medicanal value and educational value.     Method   The information of collection methods and organizations of their section are confusing.   For example, there should be a travel cost method and questionnaire design under it. Provide purther detail of choice experimental / contingent method. The poission regression method is considered weak to estimate the coefficient of travel cost. Generally, the variance of number of visits can be greater than mean. In this problem the negative bionomial model is considered appropriate. The data problem in th travel cost method is further complecated. In this  You surveyed the people only those visted on the site. These are many potential users who have not been visted. Some potential visiors do not visit there. This situation created data with trucated problem. Therefore, the truncated negative bionomial regression method is consiodered better method to estimate the coefficients  of costs and other factors determining the number of the forest users. There are many online literatures about the trucated negative binomial regression method.     Results and discussion   I suggest to place the Table 3 to Table 6 in appendix (not in supplement).  They are not tables of result. Presenting the choice sets applied in contingent valuation of amenity are worth of includig in method section, if too mnany, place in appendix section.  Table 9 and simialr other result formating: only 3 digit after decimal such as 1.865 for constant. Merge coefficient and stad error in a column, z statistics and prob in another column, minimum and and maximum in anther column. The figure can be better presented in parantheis such as 1.865 (1.427)   Instead of writting "The results of this study are suported by ... i suggested writing 'The finding of this study is consistent to the study by .....   Conclusion section 1. You require to state the type of forest (urban recreation) to explain percentage share of economic value of individual services. Total value is supposed to be in per ha basis. The third para (started from "Moreover..") from last of the section is worth of removing. The writing of the another para (started from There are also some future.." requires improvement. 

Author Response

Thank you so much for the fruitful comments and suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised manuscript is much improved. Authors amended the text in accordance with recommendations of the reviewers. A better presentation of methods was provided, grounded on the literature. The presentation of results and corresponding discussion were also substantially revised.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer thank you for all your help in improving this paper.

Also, I take note on the minor English language check required. Dr Marcus Griffin has helped to do the checking. (You may choose : simple markup) to view all changes.

Thank you,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The revision made the manuscript much better. Some improvements are are still needed. They are as follows.

1. Missing title of Figure of the Appendix A. I believe the figure is of the choice set for contingent valuation.  
2. The authors stated that amenity value was determined by the Choice modelling method. The method requires a comprehensive work and many replications of choice sets. The manuscript explained well  about application of the travel cost method but nothing about choice modelling method. The authors require providing detail information about it. If the values are published in other paper please state them. I suggest providing number of replication per respondent, attributes in choice set and number of sample in the study. If it is done very poor method, I advise to follow the value from other similar areas with benefit transfer method.
3. I advise to present economic value of each service per hector per year basis. Such figure can be understandable for all readers. Also your work is more likely to be cited by many readers.   

Author Response

Dear reviewer thank your for all your comments and suggestions to improvise this paper

Thank you,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf