Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 283

Today most of the management options, starting from regulatory measures to the
technological alternatives are evaluated by SEA trying to predict the costs and the
benefits of the new regulations or of the ERR measures/technologies to be applied in
the course of environmental management. SEA is equally important in the management
of small contaminated sites and in strategic decision making in spatial planning and in
local, nationwide or regional regulation. The REACH (2006) regulation on chemicals
has also prepared the basic scenario and estimated the impacts of the legislation on
different areas of the environment as well as on industrial production and other socio-
economic issues (REACH baseline study, 2009).
One of the problems of SEA is how to economically valuate the nonmarket goods
of nature, the ecosystem, the ecosystem services such as clean water, clean air, usable
land, ecosystem as a whole, the ecosystem members, the important or emotionally
outstanding species and the landscapes. Some environmental-economic models have
been developed for valuating the ecosystem and methods based on interviews, on
the opinion of people or their willingness to pay (WTP) (a virtual market) for the
hardly valuable items of the environment. Economic values of ecosystem services based
on WTP are expressed in relative terms and used for prioritization and comparison.
Generally, the following items are evaluated: types of services and their level; the
number of people who benefit from these services; their incomes; their preferences; the
cost of gaining/keeping access to the service; and the availability and cost of substitutes
(Ecosystem Valuation, 2013).
Research of VITO (2013), for example, focuses on finding consistent ways to
determine how the different forms of land use and environmental quality contribute
economically to welfare and well-being, and how the inter-relationships can be stud-
ied and modeled. Some problem areas of economic evaluation of the ecosystem are
the indirect benefits which arise from improving the environment (e.g., the long-term
beneficial effects of buffer zones, the benefits which can be calculated as the estimated
damage/costs of an avoided flood) or the benefits occurring at large time delay and great
distance in space counted from the intervention (restriction of nutrient use to avoid
eutrophication, or limiting ozone depleting chemicals) or too high uncertainty between
the measure and the resulting positive environmental impact (substitute chemicals).
6.1 Traditional forms of socio-economic assessment
The assessment and evaluation of cost efficiency (CEA), costs and benefits (CBA) and
multi-criteria analysis (MCA) are the most traditional SEA methodologies. Definitions
and short discussions are given below.
6.1.1 Cost effectiveness analysis (CEA)
CEA is a comparative tool for assessing management options and RR alternatives
selected for achieving the same target environmental quality (EQC) from the point of
view of the costs, without assessing the benefits. From the result of CEA, the decision
maker can select the less expensive, the most cost-effective version, or can decide if
the application of a new, unknown option is feasible or not from the economic point
of view. Costs may incur due to traditional material, energy and labor costs, but
environmental and social costs may be considered, too. The principle of assessing the