Assessing the Sustainability, Users' Perception and Willingness to Pay for Management of Public Beaches of Karachi

Abstract

Beaches are an important natural resource with complex ecosystems and are also extremely popular for recreational usage. In the recent times, beach tourism is expanding rapidly and found to be reliant on sustainable management of these areas. Sustainability assessments are carried out considering factors related to social, environmental, and economic capital of the study area. Indicators related to these factors were compiled to formulate sub-indices evaluating the social (SSI), environmental (ESI), and economic (EcSI) sustainability. These sub-indices were then used to evaluate a compound beach sustainability index (BSI) depicting the overall sustainability of beaches. The assessment tool was deployed on Clifton, Hawkesbay, Sandspit, French Beach and Paradise Point beaches of Karachi, Pakistan. The beaches perform well in terms of environmental sustainability; infrastructure and services were shown to be extremely compromised in term of quality impacting the social sustainability sub-index and under-developed areas around most recreational beaches impacted the economic sustainability sub-index. User perceptions recorded from these recreational beaches showed that the public concerns are aligned with the indicators scoring low on the sustainability assessment with a special interest in provision of infrastructure and services. A large percentage of the respondents were willing to pay for better management of beaches and average reasonable charge was computed to be PKR 101 (USD 0.62).