Valuing Foreign Disasters in International Environmental Law

Abstract

This book chapter argues that explicit valuation of foreign disasters can help policymakers think through the relative value of foreign and international disaster policies as against other demands on the public’s resources. It identifies the valuation decisions that policymakers inevitably face when developing international disaster policy, and argues that foreign disaster contexts present distinctive political, philosophical, psychosocial, and practical features that should be understood to distinguish foreign disaster valuation from domestic disaster valuation. In light of the complexity of foreign disaster valuation, the chapter argues that explicit — rather than implicit — valuation processes offer useful features to policymakers, by helping to systemize the complexity of competing risks and obligations, and by acting as a tonic to the intuitive and heuristic psychological processes that may otherwise underlie implicit valuations of foreign harms. Finally, the chapter identifies specific opportunities in international environmental law for incorporating explicit valuation into policymaking. These opportunities include verifying the satisfaction of threshold conditions to trigger legal requirements; choosing among multiple feasible compliance strategies; adding content to common but differentiated responsibilities; operationalizing the precautionary principle; and justifying the creation of legal strategies for special disaster risks such as those that are truly uncertain or those with extremely damaging potential outcomes.