Most people care about the natural environment. They care either because it affects their health or because they just like it. There are two ways to build environmental caring into economic analysis. One way is to assign monetary values to environmental attributes and include them in monetary analyses. The other way is to examine tradeoffs between environmental attributes and money-based ones, such as profitability.

This page covers the environmental valuation approach. Many methods are available for estimating environmental values.

A good overview of these methods can be found at the Ecosystem Valuation web site: www.ecosystemvaluation.org.

In order to take advantage of prior studies, some government agencies have assembled databases of prior studies that developed environmental values. Great care should be taken when transferring values from the time and place where they were developed to other settings. However, these databases provide a useful frame of reference.

ENVALUE environmental valuation database
ENVALUE, developed by the New South Wales (NSW) Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) of Australia is a collection of environmental valuation studies presented in an on-line database. It is a Australia-based web site but US environmental valuation studies are also included.

Environmental Valuation Reference Inventory (EVRI)
EVRI is a database for benefits transfer. This database was developed by Environment Canada in collaboration with a number of international experts and organizations among which the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water is especially noteworthy. The EVRI is an exclusively Web-based application, designed for use with Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Users may choose to work in English, French or Spanish. Subscription is required to access the database.