Environmental Valuation under Sustainable Development

Abstract

Environmentalism has evolved since the 1960&s;s from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the American experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world. Reasoning from a partial-equilibrium framework, economists have argued that environmental valuation and the incorporation of such values in decision-making is a way of caring for future generations. The principle of sustainable development—that needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to the present—is widely accepted. The environmental-valuation literature addressed the interests of future generations through its early association with questions of wilderness preservation. The relationships between social goals and valuation identified by the general-equilibrium framework, however, indicate serious conceptual inadequacies in the analyses to date of global issues such as climate change.