**4.3 Willingness to pay: extrapolation**

Even though the Hambach Forest seems to no longer be immediately threatened in the near future, an extrapolation of the stated WTP values is of high interest, for example, in order to be able to compare the stated value to those of other natural goods. As discussed, the estimation is rather conservative, since we did not exclude potential protest zeros, which generally account for between 5% and 50% [43, 48]. Given the representative character of the survey for the German population, an extrapolation of the mean value of 26.83€ for the full-age population of Germany, which is about 67 million people [49], would result in roughly 1.8 billion € without considering benefits for future generations and people outside of Germany. This correlates to roughly 3.6 million € per ha. However, the following points may have led to a higher estimated value:


On the other hand, we did not provide the opportunity to state a quasi-negative WTP for our scenario to account for the fact that people might also be willing to pay in order to avoid the preservation of the Hambach Forest and favor instead the continuation of the original lignite mining plan. Just to compare these values, in North Rhine-Westphalia, the prices for forest areas—mainly working forest—in 2020 range from 10,000 to 30,000€ per ha according to a sales platform.
