Valuing both the environment and the changes in the level of environmental quality is of central importance to environmental policy formulation, as it puts the costs of obtaining certain environmental goals into perspective. In this article, which was published in the December 2008 issue of "Ökologisches Wirtschaften", Holger Gerdes and Anneke von Raggamby propose a methodology to assess the policy impacts of environmental valuations.

So far, there is no standard unit for measuring influence, nor an index for it. This article outlines a quantitative approach to measuring the policy impacts of valuation results. The method presented translates the abstract dimension ‘policy impact’ into a measurable unit. In this way, it is possible to assess and compare the policy impacts of different monetary assessments to each other. 

The ideas presented in the article have been developed in the context of the EXIOPOL Integrated Project, in which Ecologic is a partner.