Knoke, T.; Gosling, E. & Paul, C. (2020): <b>Use and misuse of the net present value in environmental studies</b>. <i>Ecological Economics</i> <b>174</b>(106664), 1-15.
Resource Description
Title:
Use and misuse of the net present value in environmental studies
FOR816dw ID:
1872
Publication Date:
2020-07-16
License and Usage Rights:
Resource Owner(s):
Individual:
Thomas Knoke
Contact:
email:
knoke <at> forst.tu-muenchen.de
Center of Life and Food Science Weihenstephan
Institute of Forest Management
Technische Universität München
Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 2
85354 Freising
Germany
Individual:
Elizabeth Gosling
Contact:
email:
webmaster <at> tropicalmountainforest.org
Individual:
Carola Paul
Contact:
email:
carola.paul <at> tum.de
Center of Life and Food Sciences Weihenstephan
Institute of Forest Management
Technische Universität München
Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 2
85354 Freising
Germany
Abstract:
Environmental studies regularly use the net present value (NPV) to value benefits and costs of projects. However, the NPV disregards whether the stream of net benefits is steady or volatile and ignores the distribution of net benefits among different groups of people. Here we test alternatives to NPV, building on two example cases: 1) We use discounted utility (DU) to evaluate land-use projects and calculate opportunity costs for avoided deforesta-tion. 2) We simulate decision-making on tropical deforestation, whereby we use multiple decision criteria to consider the distribution of net benefits between two groups: farmers and conservationists. Results show considerable differences in the ranking of projects between DU and NPV, when projects are not marginal. Compared to DU, NPV regularly overestimates the value of forest plantations. Moreover, NPV tends to overstate the opportunity costs of avoiding deforestation in terms of saved carbon emissions. Not accounting for the distribution of net benefits in optimizing land-use allocation leads to suboptimal simulated deforestation scenarios. We therefore suggest that future studies should either also use DU to value economic consequences of projects or that they use the NPV as only one among several socio-economic and ecological decision criteria.
Keywords:
| land allocation | Net present value | Discounted utility | Euclidian distance | Uncertainty |
Literature type specific fields:
ARTICLE
Journal:
Ecological Economics
Volume:
174
Issue:
106664
Page Range:
1-15
Metadata Provider:
Individual:
Thomas Knoke
Contact:
email:
knoke <at> forst.tu-muenchen.de
Center of Life and Food Science Weihenstephan
Institute of Forest Management
Technische Universität München
Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 2
85354 Freising
Germany
