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Hong Kong Strategic Environmental Assessment Information Kit - Environment Protection Department - HKSAR

Part III : How to Conduct SEA?

SEA Methodologies and their Applications in Hong Kong

Methods Remarks Applications in Hong Kong
(IX) Economic Valuation
  • To deal with social and private cost in the market as a result of certain activity (i.e. a negative environmental externality).
  • Different valuation approaches available, including hedonic pricing, willingness-to-pay, etc.
  • In the SEA context, might not have resource available to carry out the valuation studies.
  • Thus, probably have to work with the benefits transfer approach, i.e. utilizes results and data from existing studies and adjusts them to different situations.
  • Data for detailed valuation studies is not available in Hong Kong.
  • Relevant studies in other parts of the world have been used with local emissions to demonstrate the likely consequence.
  • Pointed out the limitation of the current economic and financial assessment which did not take into consideration the environmental implications (both benefits and impacts) that are borne by the society.
  • Help to justify railway proposals that are marginally not viable in financial terms.
  • Example : RDS2 –
    In view that there is limited information and experience in monetarising environmental costs and benefits, and that monetarisation implicitly allows the environmental costs and benefits to be ‘traded-off’ by other economic factors, environmental costs and benefits were presented in the form of quantitative environmental information rather than monetarized terms. By producing two key issues papers - one on the economic appraisal of environmental costs and benefits of railways, and another on comparative assessments of road vs. rail, the whole picture of benefits and impacts borne by the community was well presented.