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Environmental Valuation and Accounting [1]

Evaluating the costs and benefits associated with conventional material and energy products can generally be reduced to a simple examination of their prices as an indication of the willingness of the buyer to pay and the seller to accept compensation for the exchange of these goods and service. However, many of the goods and services provided by the environment do not come with a pricetag (e.g., the appreciation one might have for viewing a natural landscape, or the ability of water bodies to absorb pollution). Environmental valuation involves a number of approaches designed to assess a monetary value to environmental goods and services so that they can be readily considered in economic calculations.

Environmental accounting is the practice of identifying and allocating environment-related costs (generally those that are monitarily quantifiable) directly to the activities that cause them so as to improve the quality of economic decision making.

Taken together, environmental valuation and environmental accounting help move us toward consideration of the full cost of our activities. This is seen by many as a prerequisite for moving our social and economic systems toward sustainability.

The questions we want to ask here are:

– How useful are these tools in moving us toward a more sustainable future?

– How could/should we as environmental managers use these tools?

– How do we ensure that others in our organizations use these tools?

Posts in Environmental Valuation and Accounting [1]:

Environmental, economic, political, and ethical integration in a common decision-making framework

December 19, 2007 by , amathew , Brian Butler | Filed under: Codes of Practice,Environmental Valuation and Accounting [1],Literature Review,Standards of Competence | No Comments »

The article begins by stating that the field of environmental management necessitates various tools and that as relationships are found between these tools, more specific and wider models can be developed to provide integrated solutions to environmental problems.  The authors makes the claim that, while most environmental managers use their values as a starting point when making decision, values and ethics can be incorporated into the process throughout.  The article goes on to explain that there have been many attempts to incorporate environmental ethics into the economic and policy decision-making process and the authors propose a model that will further help those attempts.  The model is called The Concentric Spheres Model and consists of a Technical sphere; that lies within an Economic sphere; that lies within a Political sphere; that lies within an Ethical sphere; that lies within a Philosophical sphere; that lies within an Ontology sphere.  The model can be used beginning from the outside spheres or from the inside spheres.  The authors conclude that “every decision-making level, or sphere, includes and defines the framework of the process of the interior spheres, lacking themselves all the tools required to solve the environmental conflict if they are not already settled. The decision-maker must look to the superior spheres to solve a problem when uncompromising conflicts appear at one stage.”  Essentially, when a decision is being made, the use of the model enables the decision makers to move through each sphere of concern until a final decision can be made that satisfies all of the components.

 

 

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