1.2 Scale of Relative Importance and Damage Schedule as an Alternative Approach
Realizing the growing concern for obtaining accurate measures of natural resource and environmental values, and the
problems associated with existing techniques, the damage schedule method is proposed in this study as an
alternative approach. The method aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of the values of natural
resources and environmental assets, without the need for direct monetary valuation. This is done by using people’s
judgements in the ranking of the relative importance of different resource losses and of different impacting activities.
While people may not be able to provide consistent monetary measures of environmental losses (Rutherford et al.
1998), they are faced with a much less difficult task when asked to compare the severity of the two losses or the
two activities. Therefore, they may be able to provide consistent rankings of the relative importance of different
resource losses and activities that have adverse impacts on the environment. Even in the case when two losses or
events are incommensurable, reasonable choice and ordinal ranking can still be made: "
" (Sunstein
1994).
Options can be
incommensurable in this way while still being very much subject to reasonable choice… Indeed, reasonable
choices among incommensurable options are the stuff not merely of law, but of everyday lif