Cooperation amongst natural resource users is key to manage ecosystems sustainably and achieve environmental goals proposed by policy and regulations. This paper focuses on the impact that livestock farming can have on the quality of a water body and investigates farmers' willingness to cooperate to preserve water quality under two different sources of uncertainty and four different degrees of uncertainty. The first source relates to the level of water quality that must be guaranteed in a river catchment to avoid irreversible deterioration of aquatic ecosystems (threshold uncertainty, i.e. with catastrophic consequences). The second source relates to the financial losses that farmers will experience in the long run if they fail to cooperate (impact uncertainty). To this end, a lab‐in‐the‐field experiment was conducted with livestock farmers of Northern Ireland. A local public good game with threshold uncertainty was framed around an agri‐environmental scheme designed to create ungrazed buffer zones for water quality preservation. Results indicate that uncertainty generally hampers farmers' cooperation and the provision of information geared to reduce uncertainty enhances it. Impact uncertainty has a milder negative impact on cooperation than threshold uncertainty. Risk preferences and probability weighting do not influence cooperation, while loss aversion has an influence on cooperation.

中文翻译：

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科学不确定性下农民合作改善水质：实验室现场实验


自然资源使用者之间的合作是可持续管理生态系统和实现政策和法规提出的环境目标的关键。本文重点关注畜牧业对水体质量的影响，并调查了在两种不同的不确定性来源和四种不同程度的不确定性下农民合作保护水质的意愿。第一个来源涉及河流流域必须保证的水质水平，以避免水生生态系统不可逆转的恶化（阈值不确定性，即带来灾难性后果）。第二个来源涉及农民如果不合作（影响不确定性）将长期遭受的经济损失。为此，我们与北爱尔兰的畜牧农民进行了现场实验室实验。具有阈值不确定性的当地公共利益游戏是围绕农业环境计划制定的，该计划旨在创建未放牧的缓冲区以保护水质。结果表明，不确定性通常会阻碍农民的合作，而提供旨在减少不确定性的信息会增强合作。与阈值不确定性相比，影响不确定性对合作的负面影响更轻微。风险偏好和概率权重不影响合作，而损失厌恶对合作有影响。