The Environmental Merit Perspective

Text 16D

The rationale behind the Environmental Merit Perspective is that clean-up operations determine environmental costs and benefits beyond those encompassed by the risk assessment. A clean-up operation may result into the use of scarce resources, such as energy, transfer the pollution to other compartments, such as emissions to surface water during operations, and to secondary effects, like the emission of greenhouse gases due to combustion of fossil fuels. These consequences cannot be grasped by neither the risk analysis, nor by the traditional financial assessment carried out before remediation. This cost assessment usually does not include valuation of environmental goods, and thus internalization of the values of environmental resources.

The evaluation of clean-up operations in terms of environmental merit is based on an Environmental Merit Index (EMI). This index is constructed by rating the performances of clean-up options against a list of measurable aspects and by aggregating these performances with a weighting scheme.

The environmental merit perspective aims at quantifying the performances of candidate cleaning-up options along these evaluation criteria. These results of environmental performances are based on the comparison of alternatives. Since these criteria largely represent independent concerns for the cleaning-up operations, the approach through additive value functions can be applied.

The overall environmental quality of a remedial option is a weighted combination of the different performances. Intuitively, weights represent the relative importance of one attribute compared to another. The higher the weight attached to an aspect, the more the aspect drives the evaluation. Weights are assessed through interviews. Precise question answer protocols are used to ensure that the respondent provides weights which are a true representation of his/her decision strategy.

There are fundamental questions raised by this approach to environmental merit:

1.Does the current practice of soil remediation lead to a positive balance for the environment?

2. Who and how many experts should be interviewed?

3.Are the differences in option across experts significant for the evaluation?

The use of an environmental merit index shows that the environmental balance of soil cleaning-up cannot be assumed to be positive in all cases. Instead, it should be considered as an objective of the cleaning-up operations to be achieved by carefully designing remedial activities.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27