English Abstract This study seeks to set priorities for environmental
policy in the Netherlands. We focused on seven environmental issues
including: climate change, acidification, low level ozone, particulate
matter, noise, eutrophication and land contamination. These issues are
prioritised using three different approaches: damage assessment, public
opinion and 'disability adjusted life years'(DALYs). According to the
damage assessment approach the priorities, in terms of potential benefits
from full control, are low level ozone, land contamination and particulate
matter, followed by acidification and climate change, whilst noise and
eutrophication are estimated to yield the lowest potential benefits from
control. However, in the absence of cost estimates no conclusions can be
reached on the desirability of control measures. Public opinion surveys
show that environmental issues other than the seven considered in this study
are a major concern for the Dutch public, namely chemical release and oil
pollution. However, focusing on the seven issues considered in this study,
the Dutch public rank, climate change, acidification, eutrophication and air
pollution from cars (interpreted as low-level ozone and PM10) as the issues
of most concern. According to the DALYs approach the health effects of air
pollution from particulate matter, and to a certain degree from low level
ozone, dominate the disease burden. The future disease burden is largely
due to changes in the population structure, i.e. an increasing, aged
population. Another environmental problem associated with a high disease
burden is noise exposure from road and air traffic. Based on a simple
'Borda count', a final ranking for the environmental issues is made. This
study concludes that land contamination, climate change and particulate
matter are top priority environmental issues in the Netherlands, followed by
acidification, low level ozone, eutrophication and finally noise. These
findings suggest that future policies focusing on the top issues may yield
considerable benefit depending on their cost of control. Although ranking
environmental issues is useful in the sense of highlighting priority issues
and indicating if there is any surprise environmental issues for the
Netherlands. It is important to note that the benefit estimates offer only
some guidance on environmental priorities, in the absence of data on costs
of implementing policies only part of the picture necessary for establishing
priorities is provided. For a full-scale economic analysis benefit
estimates need to be compared with cost estimates within a CBA framework.
This is outside the scope of this study, however a separate paper on the
issues relating to and experience with such CBAs is presented in Annex
II.
