Values of Environmental Decision-Making

This chapter looks at the term value mostly from the perspective of risk assessment. It reviews the concept of value from three different but related viewpoints: objective value through the basis of scientific quantification of risk, subjective value through the notion of perceptions, and the scaling of value from an individual to a group perspective, including national and international bodies. The chapter aims to understand the dynamics that impact how environmental decisions are made from a value-based approach. As a primer in environmental decision-making, there is a need to gain a sense of how learning dynamics theory is evolving, and how certain parts of the theory might be applied to modeling behavior and understanding the relationship between actions and responses. Objective forms of valuation in the environmental field rely on subfields of science, spanning from traditional use of the scientific method to more social science-related disciplines such as economics.