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The concept of disproportionate cost is one of the key economic elements of the EC Water Framework Directive (WFD): if achieving the environmental objectives of the Directive should be disproportionately costly, Member States can deviate from the objectives. For the practical implementation of this concept, the Member States follow different approaches. In particular, the role of economic valuation methods in this process differs between Member States. In this lecture Benjamin Görlach provided an introduction to the concept and discussed the demand of policy makers for economic information in decisions related to exemptions. The presentation was based on interim results of the AquaMoney FP6 project.

Ultimately, the judgement on the disproportionality of costs will be a political judgement based on economic information. Against this background, the lecture by Benjamin Görlach first examined the pros and cons of using monetary benefit estimates decisions on disproportionate costs. Subsequently, Benjamin Görlach presented findings of an assessment of policy maker demand carried out as part of the EU-funded AquaMoney research project. The aim of this assessement was to elicit policy makers' demand for different types of economic information to support their decisions under the WFD: which type of economic information will most likely be used in which stages of the decision making process, and for which aspects is guidance most urgently required.

The 7th International Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics, organised by European Society for Ecological Economics Economics (ESEE) took place from Tuesday 5th to Friday 8th June 2007, at the UFZ Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig. This four-day conference brought together international scientists from multiple disciplines who work on sustainability issues at the boundary of economy and ecology, both from more theoretical and more practise oriented perspectives.

The presentation [pdf, 225 KB, English] and the abstract [pdf, 13 KB, English] by Benjamin Görlach are available for download.