Sustainable Series Webinar

This past fall, the EPA issued a new Handbook providing recommendations for economic analysis of land cleanup and reuse activities and programs. These activities pose significant measurement problems associated with such unique qualities as the diversity of contaminants and affected media across sites, market pricing problems such as stigma, and the impacts of significant events that transpire over the course of a sometimes lengthy time frame.

EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and its Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response collaborated to assure that the new Handbook was both economically rigorous and applicable in the real-world. The peer- reviewed Handbook reviews some outstanding analytical problems and then provides policy planners and evaluators with recommendations for estimating the benefits, costs, and economic impacts of land cleanup and reuse. The state of knowledge is such that many questions remain in the literature so the Handbook highlights relevant questions as well.

Two of its authors, Robin Jenkins and Heather Klemick, will review the Handbook, address the distinction between benefit-cost analysis and the more common economic impact analysis and discuss some issues regarding use of property value analysis for estimating land cleanup and reuse benefits. Peter Meyer, who will moderate the webinar, will join them in discussing the use of the Handbook by local public sector decision-makers and its value in assessing the net local economic gains associated with different redevelopment choices.