Impact Assessment & Compensation

Conventional impact assessments focus on a narrow set of topics that have a ready price in the free-market, ignoring many of the intangible values that are most important to people. We specialize in social and cultural impact assessments using techniques designed to do a better job of making sure things like culture, community, the environment, sacred values, and other intangibles are appropriately included in an impact analysis.

Like all impact assessments, we will undertake the essential work to understand potential change — its magnitude, extent, duration – and, ultimately, the significance of these impacts to the people experiencing the change. We can then help develop a suite of mitigation and avoidance options and, in many cases, translating these impacts into dollar terms – a single metric that lets us compare market and non-market (or intangible) values. This final step can help communicate the magnitude and significance of these impacts on those affected and develop better options, including more appropriate and defensible compensation.

This type of work requires a participatory approach, working with those experts (e.g., scientists, Elders, engineers, hunters) who are able to determine the impacts and those affected to determine how important the impacts are. We use well-established evaluation tools and stated preference methods, based on decision analysis and multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). These methods have been broadly applied and accepted by regulatory agencies in Canada, the United States and internationally.

We have served as expert witnesses and supported the negotiation of settlement agreements.

For a copy of our Non-Market Valuation brochure, Click here.

Interview: To hear William Trousdale’s conversation with CBC on ‘non-market valuation’ Click here.

Training: Interested in training or capacity building? Contact us.