Exploring Preference Heterogeneity and Acceptability for Forest Restoration Policies: Latent Class Choice Modeling and Principal Component Analysis

The restoration of forest ecosystems damaged by wildfires and pest outbreaks has become increasingly urgent. However, the public-good nature of forests, the involvement of diverse stakeholders, and the spatial variability of degradation present significant challenges to effective policy design. In particular, previous studies have largely examined these threats in isolation, and few have provided integrated economic analyses of their combined impacts. This gap underscores the need to better understand heterogeneous public preferences and their implications for restoration policy. To address this, we conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 1021 Korean citizens and applied a two-stage analytical framework combining principal component analysis (PCA) and latent class choice modeling (LCM). Five distinct preference segments were identified, each exhibiting substantial variation in willingness to pay (WTP) for restoration attributes. Policy simulations further revealed that public acceptance declines sharply at higher cost levels, highlighting the importance of setting realistic financial thresholds for broad support. While visual materials, consequentiality checks, and cheap talk scripts were employed to mitigate hypothetical bias, the limitations of external validity and potential sampling biases should be acknowledged. Our findings provide empirical evidence for tailoring restoration policies to different stakeholder groups, while also stressing the financial and institutional constraints of implementation. In particular, the results suggest that cost thresholds, citizen engagement, and awareness-raising strategies must be carefully balanced to ensure both effectiveness and public acceptance. Taken together, these insights contribute to evidence-based forest policymaking that is both economically efficient and socially acceptable, while recognizing the context-specific limitations of the Korean case and the need for comparative studies across countries.