A DISCUSSION TOPIC FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT:
Willingness-to-pay (WTP) underpins many environmental valuation techniques (Munasinghe 1994). However, people often make choices which are clearly detrimental to their wellbeing in the longer term, such as smoking, or spending income rather than saving for retirement. These decisions are often regretted with the benefit of hindsight. Given what these examples seem to reveal about human behaviour, how accurately can we expect people to reveal their true WTP for environmental values which might not immediately affect them, but which might in the future, or will perhaps only affect future generations? How might uncertainty about the full environmental effects of a decision affect apparent WTP? What do you think are the biggest challenges in valuing non-market priced environmental goods and services?
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/ilws/researchers/climatechangeworkingpaper.pdf
http://www.sni-hueting.info/EN/Publications/1998-The-concept-of-env-function.pdf
