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Quantitative Valuation In Environmental Law, Arden Rowell

Notre Dame Law Review

Quantitative valuations of environmental impacts affect and sometimes determine the substance and stringency of many environmental laws. At the same time, a constellation of psychological factors makes environmental impacts unusually difficult for individuals to see, understand, and care about. As a result, the environmental valuations that inform environmental law are particularly vulnerable to contextual cues, small shifts in framing, and methodological choice, and can lead to sincere but wildly varying valuations of the same underlying environmental impacts. These distortions become increasingly apparent when valuations are quantified, and in fact can be used predictably to push quantified valuations “up” and “down” …