An Empirical Study on the Behavior of Landowners in order to Conserve Urban and Suburban Forest

Abstract

Recently forest land have been changed to other land use rapidly, such as residential area, road, etc. Many land use policies have been in force, but they are still fumbling. In order to make these policies effective, it is important to grasp the behavior of residents and landowners.
We focused on the behavior of forest landowners and to investigate the incentives for forest conservation policies. We interviewed landowners in Kanagawa Prefecture to clarify their situation and investigate their behavioral pattern.
The results from interviewing are as follows.(1) The more agricultural labors the landowners have, the more concentrative forest work have been done, such as mowing, inspecting and so on.(2) The returns from forest are negligible, and the municipal property tax and inheritance tax are quite high, especially their piece locates in Shigaika-Kuiki (urbanized area).(3) In the future, most of landowners think they would have to sell their land including forest because of their inherence tax.(4) Whether they offer their land to environmental use or not depends on these conditions such as their agricultural labor, how much their municipal tax are, the location of their forest and whether they have extra estates or not.