Damage Schedules: Incorporating Community Judgments of Importance of Losses
A damage schedule is a predetermined set of sanctions, restrictions, and damage payments tied to an ordered set of potential resource losses. The ordering of the schedule is based on community judgments of the relative importance of the potential losses. Damage schedules are an alternative to incident-specific assessment of the value of losses, offering advantages of cost savings, consistency across assessments, and transparent deterrence incentives. A similar approach could also be used to guide planned development of resources, offering a consistent set of value estimates and other allocation guides and incentive.
The following publications describe the damage schedule concept and evaluate the feasibility of obtaining reliable citizen judgments of the relative importance of environmental losses.
Brown, Thomas C., George L. Peterson, R. Marc Brodersen, Valarie Ford, and Paul A. Bell. 2005. The judged seriousness of an environmental loss is a matter of what caused it. Journal of Environmental Psychology 25(1): 13-21.
Brown, Thomas C., Dawn Nannini, Robert Gorter, Paul Bell, and George L. Peterson. 2002. Judged seriousness of environmental losses: reliability and cause of loss. Ecological Economics 42(3): 479-491.
Chuenpagdee, Ratana, Jack L. Knetsch, and Thomas C. Brown. 2001. Coastal Management Using Public Judgments, Importance Scales, and Predetermined Schedule. Coastal Management 29:253-270.
Chuenpagdee, Ratana, Jack L. Knetsch, and Thomas C. Brown. 2001. Environmental Damage Schedules: Community Judgments of Importance and Assessments of Losses. Land Economics 77(1): 1-11.
Rutherford, Murray B., Jack L. Knetsch, and Thomas C. Brown. 1998. Assessing Environmental Losses: Judgments of Importance and Damage Schedules. Harvard Environmental Law Review 22(1):51-101.