Designing a Policy to Reduce the Effects of Environmental Degradation of the Dasht Abbas Aquifer in Ilam Province

The agricultural environment is exposed to various damages, such as soil salinity and groundwater pollution, the most important reasons of which are high evaporation and transpiration and improper management of water resources. Therefore, implementing policies or programs to reduce damages is a way to overcome this environmental challenge. However, proper policy implementation requires both cost-effectiveness assessment and social support. The purpose of this study is to investigate farmers' willingness to pay, analyze the source of heterogeneity and determine agricultural measures to reduce environmental damage and the benefits obtained from their implementation using the choice experiment method. For this purpose, mixed logit model and latent class were used to separate heterogeneous social preferences. The needed data were obtained through face-to-face interviews and questionnaire completion from 108 users of the Dasht-Abbas aquifer in Ilam province in the year 1400. The results showed that the willingness to pay is influenced by socio-economic characteristics (level of education, age, household size, environmental orientation) and other factors such as the use of well water. Therefore, to improve the efficiency and universality of the policy, the tendency and heterogeneity of public preferences should be fully considered in the formulation of the policy. Also, based on the results obtained from the mixed logit model and the hidden class, the compensating surplus of the specified aquifer improvement scenarios was calculated. The values were increased from the average improvement scenario of the aquifer environment to the optimal improvement scenario. The compensatory surplus for the desired improvement of the features is about 98 and 138 thousand Tomans per hectare per month, respectively.