ABSTRACT
This chapter will demonstrate that assessing the worthiness of environmental projects is often a very difficult task. The difficulty is not confined to measuring the benefits of environmental assets that have been addressed already in Chapter 7. As will be discussed in this chapter, efforts to account for all the ‘social’ costs of an environmental project may lead to double-counting costs. Another complication arises from the choice of the discount rates that may have important intergenerational ethical implications. Social justice is also an important issue that should be
considered when environmental projects are assessed using the framework of CBA. Despite these challenges, CBA (especially when it is used in combination with other evaluation criteria) can be a very powerful technique for assessing the viability of environmental projects.
