Environmental Valuation

摘要: “Environmental valuation involves placing monetary values on environmental goods and services, and on changes in environmental quality resulting from certain actions or inaction”(OECD, 2001, p. 24). The main difficulty of and at the same time reason for environmental valuation is that many natural environmental goods and services are not subject to market transactions and their value is not revealed directly by market prices.Quite a few different methods have been developed to tackle this difficulty. Neither is completely satisfying though. Some of the difficulties are due to the same reasons that it is problematic to do an assessment for environmental damage causing health effects on humans; the “lack of scientific knowledge about causal relationships and lack of relevant data to establish one”(OECD, 2001, p. 25). Additional problems arise relating to the assignment of ‘value’to the object of potential protection, be it ‘non-human biota’or the ‘environment’in general. Obviously the first set of difficulties doesn’t help the second.