Cost Benefit Approaches to Valuing Nature: Case Studies in New Zealand

Section 32 of the Resource Management Act requires councils to evaluate the alternative options. Pure, fully monetised cost benefit analysis (“CBA”) is in theory the ideal preferred approach for evaluations, but it is at one extreme of a whole spectrum of related approaches based on the level of detail and quantification or monetisation. In practice, few if any s32 analyses are fully monetised, and in fact many if not most are either purely qualitative (descriptions or matrices) or a mix of qualitative and quantitative (numerical or scoring). However, there are other examples across the entire spectrum.