Environmental Damage and Risk Assessment

The problem of environmental damage and risk assessment has grown to be recognized as critically important, reflecting the emphasis of governments and political bodies on the urgency of need to control environmental degradation. This chapter reviews a number of approaches that have been applied to support decision making relative to project impact on the environment. The traditional approach has been to apply cost-benefit analysis, which has long been recognized to have issues. Most of the variant techniques discussed in this chapter are modifications of CBA in various ways. Contingent valuation focuses on integrating citizen input, accomplished through surveys. Other techniques focus on more accurate inputs of value tradeoffs. Conjoint analysis is a means to more accurately obtain such tradeoffs, but at a high cost of subject input. Habitat equivalency analysis modifies the analysis by viewing environmental damage in terms of natural resource service loss. Compensatory restoration assessed reflects actions to compensate for interim losses. Focus is thus on cost of actual restoration. Rather than abstract estimates of the monetary value of injured resources, the focus is on actual cost of restoration to baseline.