Introduction

Establishing a legal regime to address the environmental consequences of war and elaborating scientific techniques to characterize the specific nature of the damages create a need for economic methods to value these damages and to suggest appropriate compensation measures. This Part of the book surveys existing tools for valuing environmental damages, including ecological and natural resource damages as well as public health damages, and considers possible applications of these tools to the wartime context.

Considerable controversy already surrounds peacetime attempts to define the types of environmental damages that are compensable, the appropriate objectives of compensation, and the economic assessment methods that determine the monetary value of the damages. For this reason, developing compensation measures for wartime environmental damages is a dual challenge for economists, who must choose an appropriate peacetime assessment methodology that also applies to the particular complexities and severe damages arising from armed conflict.

Approaches to assessing environmental damages vary depending on the particular type of damage: ecological, natural resource, or public health impacts; use or non-use values; permanent or temporary losses; and compensation for lost values or restoration of the values – to name just a few of the variables. While damages to natural resources are usually assessed using market-based approaches, many economists believe that ecological and public health damages require other approaches in order to assess noncommercial values fully and yield sums that market-based approaches would otherwise underestimate.

This Part builds on the work of the United Nations Environment Program Working Group of Experts on Liability and Compensation for Environmental Damage Arising from Military Activities.