A payment scheme for the ecosystem services of mountain grasslands embedded in dairy products

Mountain pastures and meadows have been disappearing at a steady pace from the Italian Alpine and Apennine regions for the last century. Livestock farms and pastoral activities have traditionally contributed to preserving them, but they are facing increasingly adverse socio-economic and climatic trends The aim of the paper is to explore the economic feasibility of a payment scheme for grassland-based ecosystem services embedded into locally produced dairy products that can compensate farmers' effort and increase their profitability. Using the method of discrete choice experiments, we estimate Italian consumers' willingness to pay for a set of selected attributes of mountain cheese associated with provisioning, cultural, and existence ecosystem services. Our results indicate that consumers would be willing to pay cheese 4euro/kg to 6euro/kg more for each increase in the level of ecosystemic attributes, thus supporting the introduction of a payment scheme as a local and scalable policy intervention.