The objective of public policy is to improve or correct components of social welfare, from economic conditions to health to the quality of the environment (Lazo and McClain, 1996). Approving development projects with significant environmental impacts implies that the forgone benefits are expected to be less than a project's financial gains. A broad variety of non-market valuation techniques exist for estimating derived environmental benefits, yet in the absence of such valuations to guide decision-making, projects may be approved which result in a net loss in social welfare (Pearce, 1998 and Dixon et al., 2013). This risk is evident in the case of Iceland, where neither the cost-benefit assessments (CBA) for renewable energy power plants nor industrial works reliant on their generating capacity have been required to incorporate such non-market considerations.