Report

Shadow Prices Handbook: Valuation and weighting of emissions and environmental impacts

The Shadow Prices Handbook provides an extensive description of the methodology employed for determining and using shadow prices and derived weighting factors for individual types of environmental impact. The Handbook provides a useful scientific background document in which relevant factors, methodological choices and the assumptions to be made in calculating shadow prices and weighting factors are explicitly detailed.

Two datasets are also presented: one based on avoidance costs, the other on damage costs. These data can be used in economic and environmental analyses, under the provision that due allowance is made for the fact that they are Dutch averages.

What makes this study unique is that the latest developments relating to environmental characterisation factors and approaches to economic valuation have been combined into a single methodologically consistent framework. The publication thus contributes not only to the existing economic literature on the valuation of externalities, but also to the environmental literature on the elaboration of weighting factors.

CE Delft first published an Environmental Prices Handbook in 2010 (then known as the Shadow Prices Handbook). An update of this was published in 2017: the Environmental Prices Handbook 2017. The Environmental Prices Handbook 2023 replaces the 2017 version.

Environmental prices of more than 3,000 substances can be found in the online tool.

Authors

Co-authors

Marisa Korteland
Sander de Bruyn