Environmental Damage Schedules: Community Judgments of Importance and Assessments of Losses

Available methods of valuing environmental changes are often limited in their applicability to current issues such as damage assessment and implementing regulatory controls, or may otherwise not provide reliable readings of community preferences. An alternative is to base decisions on predetermined fixed schedules of sanctions, restrictions, damage awards, and other allocative guides and incentives, which are based on community judgments of the relative importance of different environmental resources and particular changes in their availability and quality. Such schedules can offer advantages of cost savings and consistency over current methods, as demonstrated in the case of Thailand coastal resources.