Assessing Natural Resource Damages: An Economic Perspective serves as a comprehensive guide to assessing environmental damages resulting from oil spills and hazardous-substance releases. With more than 2,000 oil spills annually into US navigable waters, new Natural Resource Damages (NRD) claims arise each year. Most of the over 1,100 hazardous-waste sites listed as Superfund sites in the US have NRD claims underway or will eventually face such claims. Finally, tens of thousands of other hazardous-waste sites across the country are facing or may face NRD claims. This book fills a significant gap in the literature, offering insights into recent advancements in economic methods and tools, and highlights the scientific and legal issues that typically arise in an NRD assessment. Catering to economists, scientists, attorneys, and educators across the United States and Europe, where similar assessment processes exist, this book serves as an invaluable resource for navigating the complexities of NRD cases now and into the future.

• Includes more than 50 case studies, summarizing specific oil spills or hazardous substance releases, enhancing comprehension of the theme of each chapter
• Serves as a comprehensive resource on Natural Resource Damages, offering new information and citing hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles from the last 35 years
• Includes an appendix with a comprehensive bibliography on NRD-related legal articles, in addition to an appendix providing a bibliography on the Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) and Resource Equivalency Analysis (REA) methodologies, catering to scientists involved in NRD assessments