Regional Environmental Pollution, Economic Loss Assessment

The environmental pollution has a severe influence on our society and our life. It may not only cause huge losses of well-beings of our society, but set back our economic development. In order to make scientific decisions and even to achieve sustainable development, it may be a fundamental way to estimate such damages caused by pollution in terms of economic loss, and to present those different degrees of damages in form of monetary figures. Estimating regional economic losses caused by environmental pollution not only helps people learn the quantitative degree of regional pollution, but also provides the government with useful information to lay down proper policies. So far, environmental economists in foreign countries have done many researches on the various methods to estimate economic losses caused by pollution and relative theories as well. A great many cases involving environmental pollution have been analyzed. All these efforts were made intending to improve the estimating methods day by day, In this research, I firstly made a concise review of the development of estimating economic losses caused by pollution at home and abroad. At the same time, according to previous articles, I introduced some of the estimating methods which are now of frequent use at home and abroad, such as market estimating method, market replacing method, and so on. And then, I illustrated how to apply these regional estimating methods properly. Secondly, according to the Wenzhou region case in 1997, I mainly described losses caused by air pollution, acid rain pollution, water pollution and solid wastes. Those losses caused by township industrial pollution, soil pollution and pesticides pollution were also considered. On the base of researches conducted by our ancestors, I carried out a further research into some estimating methods and calculating formula when necessary on how to estimate losses caused by township industrial pollution, agricultural losses of polluted land and the capacity of forests affected by acid rain. And by so doing, it is concluded that the whole economic loss caused by pollution in Wenzhou is 2.42629 billion Yuan, 4.005 percent of the city抯 gross domestic products (GDP): 60.582 18 billion Yuan. Finally, I made a summary of this research and tried coming up with a unified loss estimating method of pollution.