Scaling the importance of environmental losses: Social values, damage assessment and the Method of Paired Comparisons

The objectives of environmental damage assessment--deterrence and fair restitution--may be served by scheduling sanctions on environmental harm according to social values of the relative importance of non-pecuniary environmental losses rather than seeking to attain, what have proven to be unattainable, accurate monetary measures of these losses.;With an experiment involving four surveys, this study explores people's ability to provide data for the formation of useful scales of relative social values that could be integrated into a damage schedule framework and form the basis for sanctions on environmental harm. A critical issue for the development of a comprehensive scale of values is whether individuals can make consistent, transitive choices between environmental losses that are dissimilar or vary across divergent dimensions of value. The Method of Paired Comparisons is used to elicit rankings of the relative importance among various environmental losses and personal injuries. Two methods for aggregating paired comparison data into ratio and interval scales are utilized and explored for their usefulness in providing scales of the degree of importance between environmental losses.;The results of this study indicate that people are able to consistently and transitively rank the degree of importance between similar and disparate environmental losses, providing encouraging prospects for credibly linking relative social values with sanctions on environmental harm.