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Pricing the Environment : An Introduction

Environmental goods and services are quite valuable. For example, Americans spend considerable time engaged in recreational activities in public parks. They pay more for homes with nice natural surroundings. They support laws and regulations to improve environmental amenities. And they spend considerable resources avoiding the potential health effects from pollution. Bergstrom and Cordell (1991) suggest that outdoor recreation in the United States is worth $172 billion per year (1997 U.S. dollars) to U.S. consumers. We clearly value environmental amenities. Unfortunately, these benefits are often neglected when policy is being made. Instead, when it comes to the environment, we focus heavily on the costs, including jobs and lost economic activity. No one can debate the importance of strong local economies, yet no one can debate the importance of environmental quality for the well being of society. How do we begin to balance economic costs with environmental benefits if little attention is paid to the benefits? This fact sheet describes several techniques that have been employed in recent years to estimate the value that citizens place on environmental goods and services. These methods can be used to evaluate the impacts of environmental policy and management decisions. They have been widely used in national policy debates, such as with the Exxon Valdez incident, administrative rules related to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and national legislative proposals, but they have been less widely used at the state and local level. Here in this fact sheet, the techniques are introduced, and a number of estimates from different studies are provided to give readers a sense for the potential scale of environmental benefits. Future fact sheets will provide more explicit information on applying these estimates to particular issues. Techniques for Valuing Environmental Resources