Coastal residents actually prefer 'messy' vegetated dunes over the 'pristine' bare sand beaches typically featured in travel brochures.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Do Coastal Residents Value Vegetated Dunes? Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment in a High-Risk Hurricane Zone
SSRN · 6468819
The Takeaway
While coastal planners often assume that beach vegetation is an aesthetic nuisance to property owners and tourists, this choice experiment found residents are willing to pay significantly more for dunes with plants. The 'pristine beach' myth often leads to welfare-inefficient coastal management policies that remove the very natural protections residents actually value.
From the abstract
We study coastal residents' preferences for beach restoration following Hurricane Ian (2022) using a discrete choice experiment with 656 households in Southwest Florida. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions in three keyways. First, residents strongly prefer vegetated dunes to bare beaches, with willingness to pay (WTP) of $100-118 per household per year, contradicting the "pristine " bare beach view that vegetation is aesthetically undesirable. Second, protection attributes act as sub