About Environmental Risk Assessment

There was a scientific seminar dedicated to environmental risks assessment in the scientific-research centre where I work. A speaker was awfully ignorant in subject unfortunately. As a person who is experienced in environmental risk assessment (see my posts about risks and a particular methodology) I was afraid that I will be the one to ask the speaker (quite an old man) some inconvenient question about formulas he used, but luckily he was ashamed by someone else.

During the discussion the question of monetary aspect of the risk and damage to environment was raised: whether it is possible to use money as the measure of risks that only applicable to environment itself. In other words: is it rational to use money when assessing possible damage to solely ecosystem (there are no money in ecosystem by itself), and how to perform such assessment?

What do YOU think? I wasn't able to find an appropriate answer at that moment, but now I believe I have a point. My answer is YES, we can use money to assess risks and damage dealt to ecosystem only.

Firstly the assessment is made by humans and for humans. And humans understand monetised value more easily. The approach that I want to propose is about assessment of money that have to be spent to recover ecosystem to exact the same state it was prior to caused or possible damage. Just imagine how much money one have to spent for recreating and reintroduction of just one extinguished species (a tasmanian wolf for example). Here you are a monetised damage to environment.

Another approach I have in mind is about evaluation of risks via relative live value of species (which can be easily monetised too). Lets use this formula for evaluation of life of individual of a given species: V=(1/N)*P, where V - relative value, N - population of the given species (or given areal of species), P - total population of the human beings. We will have a relative value as 1 for humans and 1*(P/N) for a given species. For example for a tiger we will have its relative individual value about 1 076 900! Literally, if we have a choice whether to save 1 million people or a single tiger, the tiger must be saved - not a million of people!!!

And we can monetise this value by multiplication on the average value of the single human life (you can play a bit with numbers given here).

So the damage to ecosystem may be assessed via loss of number of individuals of species that live in a given ecosystem and we are able to easily evaluate a relative value of the individuals of the each species, and it can be easyly monetised.