Estimating social costs of global warming based on multiple contingent valuation surveys

Abstract

We couldn’t find any practically useful data of social costs of air pollution available so far in Japan, especially estimated data related to the social costs of global warming in transport sector couldn’t be found. Taking this shortcoming into account, we adopted the contingent valuation method as one of methods for estimating the social cost, which could be defined as the amount that Japanese people would be willingness to pay for government policy measures to counter either the positive or negative effects on the Japanese environment and society, caused by rising air temperature from 1 to 2.5C resulting from double level of atmospheric CO₂. Several types of questionnaires were designed referring NOAA guidelines and they were used to survey 2059 people in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Sendai, Okayama, and Kumamoto. The survey showed that respondents would pay ¥7,394 - ¥9,527 per year to prevent global warming. This figure was used to determine the social cost per tone-carbon, which came to ¥7,468 - ¥9,622/tC.