Environmental sustainability and cost - benefit analysis

Efforts to 'operationalize' a concept of sustainability into appraisal methods for practical decisionmaking have been few and generally unpersuasive. In this paper it is argued that this need not be the ease if a set of environmentally compensating, or `shadow' projects within an over...

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Published inEnvironment and planning. A Vol. 22; no. 9; pp. 1259 - 1266
Main Authors Pearce, David W, Markandya, Anil, Barbier, Edward B
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Pion Ltd, London 01.09.1990
SeriesEnvironment and Planning A
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Summary:Efforts to 'operationalize' a concept of sustainability into appraisal methods for practical decisionmaking have been few and generally unpersuasive. In this paper it is argued that this need not be the ease if a set of environmentally compensating, or `shadow' projects within an overall portfolio are used to ensure a sustainability objective of setting a constraint on the depletion and degradation of the stock of natural capital. This can be achieved through both a `weak' and a `strong' sustainability criterion. In both cases the resulting optimum differs from the efficient optimum of the conventional cost - benefit criterion, but the basic cost - benefit model remains intact.
ISSN:0308-518X
1472-3409
DOI:10.1068/a221259