Sediment Damage and Farm Production Costs: A Multiple-Objective Analysis

When considering many environmental problems, society is faced with decisions involving multiple objectives and with problems in valuing environmental impacts. This study illustrates a multiple goal approach applicable to land and water resource project evaluations. The approach explicitly confronts the problem of valuing the environmental impacts of sediment and determines the implications of placing alternative relative weights on the components of the objective function. The results quantify the tradeoffs between production cost and sediment damage.