Monetarization of Environmental Assets Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Monetarization of Environmental Assets - Essay Example While this approach was reasonable in the past, the industrial revolution and its associated effects such as increased rate of population growth started to cause a substantial degree of human impact on the environment. Over the past two centuries, it has become increasingly clear to most environmentalists that human impacts on the environment are irreversible and this might eventually limit the ability of humans to continue thriving on the planet (Khalil, 1999). Over a period spanning the last three decades, there has been a global concern over this problem and the search is currently underway for the establishment of strategies that will aid in the minimization of human impacts on the environment while at the same time improving the quality of life of the billions of people that are currently living in abject poverty across the globe.Cost-benefit analysis is generally a comparison of the various increases in human well-being (benefits) and the reductions that humanity experiences in social welfare (costs) as applied to a given policy or action.In this regard, for a given policy or project to be able to qualify as being viable as based on cost-benefit grounds, its total social benefits must be found to exceed its total social costs. Whereas cost-benefit analysis is usually conducted for the specific project, the scope of this analysis can easily be extended to wider limits such as the assessment of the policies that have been designed to aid in the combating of climate change (OECD, 2007).