Economic valuation of benefits from environmental improvements: investigating threshold and interaction effects

In the assessment of environmental improvement measures in hydropower, socio-economic assessment plays an important role. At the same time, it is currently unclear how many of the environmental benefits that an environmental measure can lead to should it actually be assessed in socio-economic terms. This project will use case studies from the ongoing reassessment of hydropower to study how the Swedish population values different types of environmental improvements in watercourses affected by hydropower.

Many of the most valuable socio-economic environmental effects are linked to how the Swedish population at large values improved conservation status for threatened species and improved aquatic environments, but how much value is involved for different threatened species and different types of environmental improvements is something that must be investigated through surveys, and very few such surveys have been conducted so far. This project will help to fill that knowledge gap.