Economic Value of Skiing and Damage Forcasting due to Global Warming

Abstract

 During recent years, many skiing sites have introduced the artificial snowing machines against global warming and shortage of snow. Our precedent study has ever examined the statistical causal relationship between recent chronic decreasing of skiing visitors and global warming. With these analytic results and findings, this study also aims to evaluate the degree of economic damage of recreation service of snowy mountains due to global warming proceeding. Specifically speaking, after developing the OD database which covers winter recreation trips from each prefectures to each representative regionalty skiing slopes in Nagano Prefecture, then we have engaged in travel cost method (TCM). As the induced demand function of skiing visitors is also explained by some weather condition variables, therefore we could estimate the future volume of visitors by inserting outputs of the representative global climate model (GCM-MIROC) to these variables. The total economic damage is calculated as decreasing of consumer’s surplus (CS) as 0.3 billion JPY per year for RCP2.5 and 0.63 for RCP8.5 for this 50 years, and as 0.5 billion JPY per year for RCP2.5 and 2.44 for RCP8.5 for this 100 years. Especially, the last one equals in 35.6% of the total CS of current Nagano Prefecture.