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Disagree It is difficult to use cost-benefit analysis for matters of the environment because it is exceptionally difficult to measure natural capital, sustainability, and the state of the environment. So it is difficult and it would require new methods to successfully apply wellbeing CBA to the environment and its sustainability. But the same holds for other ways of evaluating investments: one way or another one then has to get sensible measurement. Hence, there is no obvious alternative that is better than wellbeing CBA for these matters - we simply await sensible measures of natural capital and sustainability to be able to evaluate investments.
Professor Paul Frijters
Professorial Research Fellow, CEP Wellbeing Programme, London School of Economics -
Agree The problem is that many look at wellbeing cost-benifit as the only way or the most important way, and this is, or should not, be the case. Wellbeing cost-benifit analysis has its place, but should not be the only guide. What to use and focus on depends on the situation at hand. For example, doing what's is morally right, might not provide huge amounts of wellbeing. Or it might not in the short term, or might not for this generation. Taking action based on reasons and arguments may be called for when evidence of wellbeing is missing or not available also.
Professor Aaron Jarden
Associate professor, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne -
Neither agree nor disagree I find the logic of cost-wellbeing analysis compelling, particularly for environmental policies where non-market benefits dominate. My skepticism concerns implementation rather than principle. First, it is unclear what the appropriate measure of “environmental quality” should be in a framework that aggregates across heterogeneous environmental dimensions and time horizons. Second, cost-wellbeing analysis usually relies on wellbeing–income trade-offs, yet my recent work with C. Kaiser shows these trade-offs to be highly sensitive to assumptions about the scale and cardinality of subjective wellbeing measures. For this reason, I would hesitate to draw strong policy conclusions from existing applications. In my view, cost-wellbeing analysis is promising, but it requires further methodological development before it can be fully convincing.
Doctor Anthony Lepinteur
Research Scientist, University of Luxembourg -
Disagree It is more comprehensive than just evaluating benefits and costs with regard to material standards
Professor Martin Binder
Professor of Socio-Economics at Bundeswehr University Munich -
Neither agree nor disagree Cost-wellbeing analysis will take into account the costs for future generations as well as for other species as long as individuals living today care about them. It is therefore an ethical question whether we should take into account future generations, other species, or the survivable of the planet per se.
Professor Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell
Professor of Economics, IAE-CSIC -
Disagree Cost-wellbeing analysis should not be the sole criterion, but it is necessary for informing such evaluations.
Professor Mohsen Joshanloo
Associate Professor (Psychology), Keimyung University, South Korea -
Disagree Human wellbeing is inclusive of environmental quality, in the sense that people living in filth, or without access to nature, or with inadequate healthy food are less happy. However, the reason not to say "completely disagree" is that "sustainability" implies that we are speaking of investments into environmental stewardship into the future, which will impact future generations who are unable to be surveyed far more than it impacts those presently alive. Hence, in deliberating about such investment decisions, some weighting must be applied to future generations' wellbeing. However, this is not a problem unique to cost-benefit analyses based on wellbeing. Regardless of what CBA-oriented analysis method one selects, one must make an implicit or explicit choice about how much to value future vs present generations' (expected) costs and benefits. Moreover, any CBA method is preferable to an ideologically-based method in which tradeoffs are ignored and/or human thriving is not the primary, if approximated, maximand.
Professor Gigi Foster
Professor, School of Economics, UNSW School of Economics -
Disagree Scientific research tends to focus on short-term effects, largely because long-term effects are more difficult to estimate with accuracy. As a result, given the limited empirical evidence on long-run impacts, we currently lack sufficient knowledge about the long-term well-being effects of investments in environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, substantial data are now available that could be used to model these long-term effects. Doing so would require a dedicated and systematic effort to integrate evidence across the various components of environmental sustainability. Once such modelling is undertaken, a normative decision must be made regarding the appropriate discount rate to apply to long-term well-being.
Professor Martijn Hendriks
Associate Professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam & University of Johannesburg -
Completely disagree Cost-well-being analysis (CWA) is not a perfect methodology, but it is currently the best available approach for evaluating investments in environmental sustainability. It has shortcomings and they deserve careful academic scrutiny. Critically assessing these limitations is valuable; however, identifying flaws in CWA does not imply that alternative methodologies are superior. A common mistake in critiques of CWA (and subjective well-being approaches more broadly) is to focus exclusively on their limitations without systematically comparing them to the shortcomings of alternative methods. This omission often leaves monetary cost-benefit analysis (MCBA) as the implicit default, which is a serious error.
Professor Mariano Rojas
Professor of Economics, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de PueblaRather than arguing that CWA is flawless -or even fully sound-, I argue that MCBA is a worse methodology for evaluating investments in environmental sustainability. MCBA, widely used in both private and public investment appraisal, suffers from several fundamental limitations.
First, MCBA fails to capture substantial non-market benefits and costs associated with environmental sustainability, many of which are central to human well-being.
Second, people’s willingness to pay is a poor proxy for well-being benefits. Decision utility often diverges from experienced utility due to informational constraints and the complexity of environmental impacts.
Third, willingness to pay is highly sensitive to purchasing power. In a world characterized by extreme income and wealth inequality, willingness to pay reflects the capacity to spend rather than the magnitude of environmental well-being benefits. Moreover, this concentration of wealth is deeply unfair given its historical roots in unequal power relations.
As a result, MCBA disproportionately reflects the preferences of high-income groups and countries, while systematically undervaluing the environmental interests of low-income groups. Revealed and stated preferences therefore provide inadequate information about people’s environmental values, and prices primarily reflect purchasing power rather than well-being. For these reasons, when choosing between MCBA and CWA, the latter is clearly preferable.
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Completely disagree CWA conceptually takes account of all costs and all benefits of an investment policy. Accordingly, it is a very useful input into assessing investments in environmental sustainability, though considerable thought needs to be given as to the appropriate parameters to include in the analysis (e.g. an appropriate discount rate). Scenarios with different parameters are a useful element to include in a CWA when there is considerable uncertainty about the parameters. In some cases, CWA should be supplemented with a real options analysis (aka adaptive management), especially where there are potential irreversible environmental consequences, and decisions can be made sequentially; this form of analysis encompasses the 'precautionary principle' but is not as rigid as application of that principle. Overall, CWA is a sensible tool to use to evaluate investments in environmental sustainability but it is not the sole tool, especially when irreversible consequences are possible.
Professor Arthur Grimes
Chair of Wellbeing and Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington -
Disagree Investments in environmental sustainability should be evaluated in multiple ways that may provide different insights. Cost-wellbeing analysis is one valuable way to do it.
Professor Daniel Benjamin
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Southern California -
Agree I agree conditional on the current framework of cost-wellbeing analysis. We are in the very early stages and do not have reliable estimates of wellbeing associated with the environment.
Doctor Kelsey J O'Connor
Researcher in the Economics of Well-beingFrom a life satisfaction approach, humans undervalue what is not salient to our daily lives, yet we state we would like to place value on these things -- there is a huge difference in value placed on the environment coming from revealed preference (via a life satisfaction approach) and stated preferences. And, ethical values cannot be observed from behavior alone, especially when we do not/rarely come into contact with the issues in consideration (e.g., endangered species, future generations, minority groups).
Appropriate wellbeing benefits of the environment first need to be estimated, which should consider ethical values and include benefits to future generations.
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Neither agree nor disagree The issue would be the period upon which to calculate the return; how long does it take to make people happy if we all use electric vehicles? A question almost impossible to answer, even if we had the data.
Doctor Tony Beatton
Visiting Fellow, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) -
Neither agree nor disagree It can be a sensible way to evaluate environmental sustainability investments, but it shouldn’t be used as the only decision tool. The clear advantage is that it helps value what is usually hard to price in monetary terms (such as improvements in air quality, reductions in noise pollution, and the associated health and mental health benefits) so it can make important benefits more visible in appraisal and budgeting. At the same time there are also risks. Many sustainability benefits are long-run and intergenerational, while current measurements of subjective wellbeing may not fully capture these future gains or avoided harms. Aggregating well-being over a long period of time forces choices on discount rates and introduces uncertainty. Additionally, some environmental risks—biodiversity loss or climate tipping points—may be insufficiently reflected in wellbeing data, even though they are highly consequential and potentially irreversible.
Doctor Giulia Slater
Economics Researcher, STATEC, Luxembourg -
Disagree Early calls for using well-being indicators in policy decisions were driven in part because things like pollution and land degradation could increase GDP while lowering WB. Documenting such effects is a constant work in progress but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Measures and metrics will improve overtime and while well-being analyses may not replace CBAs, they can be an important source of support for and counterpoints against CBAs.
Professor William Tov
Associate Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University -
Agree Cost-wellbeing analysis assumes that the choices people make and the well-being they report reflect what they value and what makes their lives better. However, individuals may adopt unsustainable, growth-oriented behaviors even if they genuinely care about future generations and environmental protection, because they do not believe that collective action - necessary for sustainability - is possible. In such contexts, subjective well-being reflects individual success to defend against the consequences of the expected coordination failure and not true thriving. As a result, cost-wellbeing analysis could provide unreliable evaluations of investments in environmental sustainability because it can overestimate the well-being benefits of unsustainable growth by interpreting unsustainable behaviors as welfare gains, and underestimate the benefits of sustainability investments by ignoring their effects on common goods.
Doctor Francesco Sarracino
Economist, Research Division of the Statistical Office of Luxembourg -STATEC -
Agree It may be a useful tool in some cases, but given the diversity of values there can be no democratically acceptable measure of overall well-being that is anything more than a rough approximation, focusing on certain consensus items but omitting much of what, say, the Maori in NZ value. And even that would need to be multidimensional--for instance breaking out relationships, emotional well-being, meaningful activities etc--with no principled way to aggregate across dimensions. So at best CWA could only be one tool among others.
Professor Dan Haybron
Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis UniversityCurrent measures are very useful, but only in my view for establishing general relationships between different factors like social support and anxiety, not for fine-grained analysis of specific policies in most cases. Crucially, few if any have been seriously validated across cultures, even within jurisdictions, though we know different groups answer well-being questions differently. For instance, here in St. Louis we found that Black residents--plagued by environmental racism--almost certainly underreport stress compared to White counterparts, with the lowest levels reported in some of the most distressed neighborhoods. CWA in such cases risks supporting perversely misguided policy priorities.
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Neither agree nor disagree The question, as framed, is too broad to answer meaningfully. The issue of sustainability and sustainable development more generally is not focused on the locus of environmental concerns versus other concerns but on inter-temporal issues. In other words, sustainability consists of a situation in which current levels of wellbeing are able to persist into the future and intergenerationally. This means that the key issue in any wellbeing cost-benefit analysis is the degree to which inter-temporal and intergenerational perspectives are captured by the analysis. This is not necessarily the case in using cost-wellbeing analysis to estimate the compensating variation for an outcome for a person, but this does not preclude wellbeing cost-benefit analysis that does explicitly incorporate an intergenerational perspective.
Doctor Conal Smith
Principal, Kōtātā InsightA statement that I would completely agree with is that "in evaluating investments in environmental sustainability it is essential to value the impact of the environment on wellbeing".
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Completely agree Clearly "environmental sustainability" needs a definition for this question to be interpreted. I humbly suggest that if your conception of it is already captured by a measurable stream of aggregate consumption goods (e.g., consisting of things like warm shelter, fish harvest, time with family, clean air to breathe, hours of TikTok videos watched, or whatever else is in your wellbeing value function) then it is a meaningless or at least superfluous term. Instead, it is useful when its meaning transcends what we can account for in a discounted social utility approach (e.g. Barrington-Leigh, 2021).
Professor Chris Barrington-Leigh
Professor, McGill UniversityThere is already a large set of studies within the subjective wellbeing literature that quantifies the impact of environmental goods on life satisfaction (Maddison, Rehdanz, and Welsch, 2020). For instance, exposure to noise, pollution, and green space appear to have an immediate, quantifiable, and sustained effect on life satisfaction (e.g., van Praag and Baarsma, 2005; Levinson, 2018; Ambrey and Fleming, 2014). Reduction of exposure to lead, or ensuring the viability of a fishery, may be predicted to affect life conditions, over a generation, in a way that we can map onto life satisfaction.
However, some future outcomes are too complex to predict well (complex systems, long time scales, high uncertainty). How might gradual topsoil erosion, land use change, groundwater depletion, or fossil fuel extraction be incorporated into a government decision-making framework? Not through cost/benefit analysis. These we address instead through a conservation rationale: avoid changing complex systems too fast. For instance, we target carbon neutrality rather than relying on projections of adaptation cost 100 years from now. This complexity and uncertainty are the problem with Solow's vision of weak sustainability (Solow, 1991).
Refs:
Ambrey, Christopher and Christopher Fleming (2014). “Public greenspace and life satisfaction in urban Australia”. In: Urban Studies 51.6, pp. 1290–1321
Barrington-Leigh, "Life satisfaction and sustainability: a policy framework," SN Social Sciences, doi:10.1007/s43545-021-00185-8, July 2021.
Levinson, Arik (2018). “Happiness and Air Pollution”. In: Handbook on Well-being, Happiness, and the Environment. Ed. by David Maddison, Katrin Rehdanz, and Heinz Welsch.
Maddison, David, Katrin Rehdanz, and Heinz Welsch, eds. (2020). Handbook on Well-being, Happiness, and the Environment. Edward Elgar.
Solow, R. M. (1991). Sustainability: An economist's perspective. The Eighteenth J. Seward Johnson Lecture. Woods Hole, MA: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Marine Policy Center.
van Praag, B.M.S. and B.E. Baarsma (2005). “Using Happiness Surveys to Value Intangibles: The Case of Airport Noise*”. In: The Economic Journal 115.500, pp. 224–246.
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Neither agree nor disagree Environmental sustainability policies affect both market goods and non-market goods.
Professor Daniela Andrén
Senior Lecturer, Örebro University School of BusinessEven though market goods (e.g., energy inputs, capital, consumer products) have observed market prices, these prices reflect private costs/benefits and can be socially “wrong” when there are externalities; i.e., classic environmental market failure (Coase, 1960)
Non-market goods (e.g., clean air, biodiversity, ecosystem services) often have no market price because they are public goods or externalities. So evaluation requires shadow valuation methods, including stated-preference and wellbeing-based valuation using life satisfaction data.
Therefore, cost-wellbeing analysis is “sensible” as one tool to value non-market benefits, CONDITIONAL ON credible measurement, credible causal identification and transparency about uncertainty and aggregation assumptions.
Coase, R. H. (1960), The Problem of Social Cost, Journal of Law & Economics, Vol 3, pp. 1-44
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Completely disagree I am sure we can adapt traditional cost-benefit analyses to include the cost and benefits of protecting/damaging our natural environment.
Professor Wenceslao Unanue
Associate Professor, Business School, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
World Wellbeing Panel
In January 2026, members of the World Wellbeing Panel were asked for their views on two statements relating to sustainability and wellbeing.
The two statements were as follows:
Statement 1: Cost-wellbeing analysis (i.e., wellbeing cost-benefit analysis) is not a sensible way to evaluate investments in environmental sustainability.
Statement 2: It is acceptable for policymakers to pursue environmental sustainability policies even when these may lead to reductions in overall subjective well-being for the foreseeable future.
Response options for each statement were: “completely agree”, “agree”, “neither agree nor disagree”, “disagree”, “completely disagree”.
Below are the distributions of these categorical responses, followed by a discussion. You can click where indicated to see respondents' detailed written comments.
Cost-wellbeing analysis (i.e., wellbeing cost-benefit analysis) is not a sensible way to evaluate investments in environmental sustainability.
It is acceptable for policymakers to pursue environmental sustainability policies even when these may lead to reductions in overall subjective well-being for the foreseeable future.
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Neither agree nor disagree I agree with this in the few cases that we have reasonably good ideas about the quality and sustainability of the environment, such as whether our rivers sustain fish and our farming soil sustains edible plants. Yet, for many other matter, I do not think we know at this moment what actually are 'environmental sustainability policies' precisely because we lack good measures of natural capital and its sustainability. For instance, should good policy aim at maximum green leaf coverage of the world, and which policies do that? Is all genetic diversity good or is there such a thing as 'bad diversity' (for instance man-made genetic diversity)? It is just not clear. In the absense of having good measures (or even reasonably good guesses) of what the good outcome is, one should not do damage to wellbeing for the foreseable future.
Professor Paul Frijters
Professorial Research Fellow, CEP Wellbeing Programme, London School of Economics -
Agree If you believe we have obligations to future generations, then the answer has to be yes.
Professor Aaron Jarden
Associate professor, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne -
Completely agree This statement ultimately hinges on whether the social welfare function is defined over the SWB of current individuals only, or over the SWB of current and future generations.
Doctor Anthony Lepinteur
Research Scientist, University of LuxembourgIf policymakers were to maximise SWB only in the present, then policies that irreversibly damage the environment could be welfare-improving, which seems ethically untenable. Any sensible welfare framework must therefore assign positive weight to the SWB of future generations, in which case short-run reductions in average SWB can be justified by long-run gains.
The remaining question is how much weight future SWB should receive. I am not an expert of this literature but I would think that inferring intergenerational weights using empirical evidence on altruism and concern for future generations rather than arbitrary normative parameters would probably be more appropriate in order to be accepted at the individual level.
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Neither agree nor disagree That is a question about fairness, I would hold. But yes, fairness might dictate that the well-being of future generations merits well-being loss for the current generation. I don't think anyone would dispute this, but what rather is disputed is the rate of discount, i.e. how to weigh the concerns of future generations against the concerns of the current generation. At what point is the cost we impose on ourselves too high to be acceptable for our current socieities?!
Professor Martin Binder
Professor of Socio-Economics at Bundeswehr University Munich -
Agree As argued above, it is an ethical question whether we should take into account future generations, other species, or the survivable of the planet per se. If we think we should, and I do, then it is acceptable to pursue, as society, environmental sustainability policies that ensure live and wellbeing in the future, even if the costs for today’s generation is large.
Professor Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell
Professor of Economics, IAE-CSIC -
Agree It can be reasonable for policymakers to pursue environmental sustainability even if it lowers overall subjective well-being in the short term. If there is a credible risk of serious, long-lasting environmental harm affecting large numbers of people, it makes sense to weigh sustainability more heavily than near-term declines in well-being. This does not mean subjective well-being should be ignored, but that an explicit trade-off may be necessary to protect future welfare and avoid irreversible damage.
Professor Mohsen Joshanloo
Associate Professor (Psychology), Keimyung University, South Korea -
Disagree One must decide what one is going for. Given the notorious difficulty of forecasting (e.g., "if only we make this massive sacrifice now, then surely in 30 years we will see a reward!") and the obvious political incentives present for many people who would make such claims, i find it foolhardy to commit to certain immediate and medium-run pain on the promise of some long-run salvation. Usually, on the macro level, things don't work out that way: you get the pain, but not the gain. To me the only defensible maximand for policy that most factions and individuals could agree on is human thriving, roughly proxied by subjective wellbeing, so that is the most logical maximand for policymakers to pick.
Professor Gigi Foster
Professor, School of Economics, UNSW School of Economics -
Completely agree Current and future well-being outcomes can be traded off using an agreed-upon discount rate. This discount rate may be informed by international and national agreements on environmental sustainability goals for the coming decades. Crucially, it must be set at a level consistent with achieving those goals. If we continue to privilege current well-being at the expense of long-term well-being, the consequences may ultimately threaten the viability of the planet and, by extension, human survival.
Professor Martijn Hendriks
Associate Professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam & University of Johannesburg -
Neither agree nor disagree Pursuing overall subjective well-being is a strong argument to support policies. I can think of three (non-mutually exclusive) situations in which it may be acceptable to pursue environmental sustainability policies even if they reduce subjective well-being.
Professor Mariano Rojas
Professor of Economics, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de PueblaFirst, from a non-anthropocentric perspective that recognizes the rights of other living beings to the planet. Once we acknowledge that humans are not the sole inhabitants of Earth, a compelling argument emerges against expanding human subjective well-being at the expense of the well-being of other species.
Second, when we take into account the well-being of future generations beyond the foreseeable future, whatever that may be. If we recognize that we are merely one generational link in a long chain of life, there is a strong case for accepting reductions in present well-being in order to secure acceptable levels of well-being for those who will come after us.
Third, when reductions in overall subjective well-being occur primarily among population groups that currently enjoy high levels of well-being as a result of historically environmentally damaging development paths. For example, European countries and the United States have accumulated exceptionally large ecological footprints. Once we recognize that we are part of a global community and that our actions affect others, an argument can be made for reducing subjective well-being in countries with a highly polluting history in order to allow increases in the subjective well-being of populations with lower well-being levels and a history of relatively low environmental impact.
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Agree This statement is in keeping with the optimal application of real options analysis under the following circumstances: (negative) outcomes are irreversible, decisions can be made across time and decision-makers can learn through time about the issue. In these circumstances, it may be optimal to adopt a policy that keeps future options open. This is the case even though wellbeing is reduced for a (possibly substantial) period of time. For instance, protection of a species through banning access to a popular nature reserve, may be warranted if it is unknown whether access will protect that species or not, and there is the potential to research whether the species will be saved if access is prohibited; this approach is optimal even though a probabilistic assessment is that wellbeing will be harmed by the ban. Real options theory shows that the reason for this anomaly is that the risks are asymmetric: the ban can always be removed if future research shows it is not needed, but the species cannot be recreated if there is no ban and extinction were to be the result.
Professor Arthur Grimes
Chair of Wellbeing and Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington -
Agree Subjective well-being is not the same as well-being. If environmental sustainability practices improve a broader measure of well-being, then they are acceptable.
Professor Daniel Benjamin
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Southern California -
Agree In an ideal world, policymakers follow the mandate of their constituents, in which case, they can do whatever is mandated and ethical.
Doctor Kelsey J O'Connor
Researcher in the Economics of Well-beingHumans regularly make sacrifices for future gains and other people / species. As a free choice, these sacrifices presumably bring them value - if the public chooses to invest in the environment and subjective well-being goes down as a consequence, perhaps we are using the wrong subjective well-being metric.
As I have written before, current subjective well-being works well as a headline measure of progress but should be supplemented, especially for policy decisions.
OʼConnor, K. J. (2024). Measuring societal progress. In Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing (pp. 337-346). Edward Elgar Publishing.
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Disagree Good way to get unelected!
Doctor Tony Beatton
Visiting Fellow, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) -
Agree Moderately. Some policies may reduce subjective well-being in the short run if they involve adjustment costs, but they can still be acceptable if they are based on solid evidence and address real, potentially irreversible environmental risks. This is especially true when current wellbeing measures don’t fully capture avoided future harms and intergenerational benefits. That said, policymakers should minimize and fairly distribute short-term burdens (for instance targeted compensation and just-transition measures) and be transparent about the trade-offs.
Doctor Giulia Slater
Economics Researcher, STATEC, Luxembourg -
Disagree There are some situations where they may be no choice, perhaps... a major natural disaster where resources are so limited that long-term declines in well-being are unavoidable no matter what course of action. Of course, even in this case -- one could choose a course of action that reduces well-being the least.
Professor William Tov
Associate Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management UniversityIn general though, for well-being metrics to have value in policy making, there should be serious discussion of mitigation plans. That is, if certain policies will lead to an overall decrease in well-being, what can be done to eliminate those drops (if not boost well-being further)? Without that kind of discussion, all this talk of well-being informed policy will not have much substance.
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Completely agree Doing the opposite would be equivalent to keep playing the violin on the sinking Titanic. Environmental integrity is a precondition for human life on Earth. If no human life existed, it would be meaningless to speak of subjective well-being or of sustainability. In addition, the well-being of future generations should count in the present because current generations have the power to change and potentially irreversibly damage the conditions under which future generations will live. When environmental degradation threatens the viability of those conditions, prioritizing current well-being at the expenses of future generations means imposing lasting and unavoidable harms on people who have no voice in today's decisions. The fact that future generations can not voice their preferences does not make them less relevant in present decisions. On the contrary, it reinforces the responsibility of current generations to protect the environmental foundations of their lives, even when doing so reduces present subjective well-being.
Doctor Francesco Sarracino
Economist, Research Division of the Statistical Office of Luxembourg -STATEC -
Agree Most people reasonably value things other than SWB or happiness, as important as that is, and are willing to trade it for those values. As well, it is not plausible that nature matters merely as a resource for human well-being, and at least in the United States majorities seem to think that nature has intrinsic value. Based on past extinction events, if we trigger a sixth mass extinction we can expect a biologically impoverished planet for some ten million years, give or take. That is not a legacy many of us should be pleased to leave behind.
Professor Dan Haybron
Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis UniversityCrucially, some policies might reduce happiness while the broader suite of sustainability measures greatly increases it. (And I'm an optimist on this front.) Policies should not be assessed in isolation. And given our situation a "no sustainability effort" policy approach is unlikely to have anything other than extremely adverse impacts on subjective well-being--and well-being by any standard--for its survivors.
So as a general proposition it is hard to imagine well-chosen sustainability policies failing to promote human well-being over the next few generations compared to doing nothing, even if there are shorter-term costs. Particularly given that the public is unlikely to authorize extremely onerous policies.
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Agree Again, this is a difficult question to ask as framed. The key issue here is whether "reductions in overall subjective wellbeing" refers to the mean level or the sum. It is relatively easy to envisage situations where a policy maker might be quite comfortable with gradual natural population decline due to a birth rate marginally below replacement if this was associated with stable or higher mean wellbeing in the population even if this resulted in a smaller sum total of wellbeing. A second issue relates to what is meant by the foreseeable future. There may be genuine value in tolerating some decline in mean wellbeing in the foreseeable future to preserve option value for future generations beyond the foreseeable time horizon.
Doctor Conal Smith
Principal, Kōtātā Insight -
Completely agree The key is in "may" and "foreseeable": this reflects the uncertainty inevitable in sustainability decisions as I defined above. Moreover, not only is it acceptable in terms of my sense of optimal policy, but it can be acceptable politically, too, even when there are externalities that extend beyond the realm of any enforceable-decision-making government. That acceptability comes from having two separate rationale for policies: (1) optimization of wellbeing (or some publicly-debated preferences over the distribution of wellbeing) and (2) relatively hard constraints on certain things that represent unknowns and threats to sustainability. Such a conservation ideal can be part of a political / cultural identity, just as can democratic accountability to the quality of life experience, within the imposed constraints. Indigenous populations often conceive of these two rationale as more blended, through the concept that "everything is connected". For me, that phrase is an expression of the inevitable ignorance we have when facing complex, far-future, or highly-uncertain systems.
Professor Chris Barrington-Leigh
Professor, McGill University -
Disagree The statement treats a foreseeable reduction in overall subjective well-being as “acceptable” by default. Under standard evaluation logic, that is not defensible. Sustainability is not only “environmental outcomes"!!! If a policy improves an environmental indicator while reducing overall individual and societal well-being for an extended period, it is hard to justify calling it "sustainable" in a welfare-based policy framework.
Professor Daniela Andrén
Senior Lecturer, Örebro University School of BusinessPublic policy evaluation typically requires that environmental goals be pursued together with welfare objectives, not against them!
Moreover, environmental policies have heterogeneous effects. Some groups can lose (e.g., high-consumption households), while marginalized groups can gain substantially through cleaner local environments, health improvements, and reduced exposure to risks. Averaging can hide that, so appraisal must report distributional effects rather than "an average loss".
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Completely disagree I said "completely disagree", because the statement is misleading/wrong. There is a growing amount of literature showing that pro-social behaviors lead to higher subjective well-being (SWB). Because pro-environment behaviors (PEB) may be seen as a particular case of pro-social behaviors, we can also expect that higher PEB indeed may lead to higher SWB.
Professor Wenceslao Unanue
Associate Professor, Business School, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Analysis
Summary
Half the panel thought cost-wellbeing analysis was a sensible way to evaluate investments in environmental sustainability, but many of them and the vast majority of the panel did not think the methodology was sufficiently developed to do it at present. Long time horizons, uncertainty, and irreversible risks make it tricky to rely on a single wellbeing metric for policy in the area of sustainability. Accordingly, there is substantial support for sustainability policies that may entail short-term losses of wellbeing – mainly justified by the notion that when we do not yet know the value of the nature we are losing we should be prepared to spend some resources on maintaining it - provided that there was good empirical grounds to do so.
Wellbeing Statement 1:
This month, we asked panel members to respond to the statement that “Cost-wellbeing analysis, i.e. wellbeing cost-benefit analysis, is not a sensible way to evaluate investments in environmental sustainability.” The responses reveal no clear consensus for or against the use of cost-wellbeing analysis in the context of environmental sustainability investments. Instead, the discussion centers on how, when, and for what kinds of decisions such analyses can be meaningfully used. Almost half of the panelists (10 out of 21) disagreed or completely disagreed with the statement, while 5 (completely) agreed and 6 neither agreed nor disagreed.
A recurring concern across many responses is the risk of treating cost-wellbeing analysis (CWA) as a single or dominant decision criterion. This concern cuts across response categories, including panelists who agreed, disagreed, and remained neutral. As Aaron Jarden emphasises, CWA “has its place, but should not be the only guide,” particularly where moral reasoning or long-term obligations are at stake.
Beyond this shared concern, some panel members question the method itself for various reasons. Chris Barrington-Leigh argues that we first need to clarify what is meant by environmental sustainability. Dan Haybron similarly cautions that there is no democratically acceptable measure of overall wellbeing, noting that systematic differences in how groups respond to wellbeing questions risk “supporting perversely misguided policy priorities.” Anthony Lepinteur highlights the difficulty of defining appropriate measures of environmental quality across heterogeneous dimensions and long time horizons, while Tony Beatton and Martijn Hendriks emphasise the challenge posed by long time horizons and the lack of robust evidence on long-run wellbeing effects. As they note, substantial modelling efforts would be required before CWA could credibly guide decisions involving intertemporal trade-offs, which may be highly sensitive to assumptions about scale and cardinality of subjective wellbeing measures (Anthony Lepinteur).
Several panelists extend this line of reasoning by highlighting the particular difficulties posed by intergenerational and irreversible risks. CWA can reflect concerns for future generations and other species only insofar as "individuals living today care about them" (Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell). More generally, any evaluative framework must ultimately confront difficult ethical decisions about how to value future generations, with CWA having the advantage of making these trade-offs explicit (Gigi Foster). Kelsey O'Connor notes that individuals tend to undervalue environmental goods that are not salient in daily life, and that ethical values concerning future generations, minority groups, or other species cannot be reliably inferred from observed behaviour alone. Relatedly, concerns are raised that CWA may yield unreliable evaluations if it overestimates the wellbeing benefits of unsustainable growth while simultaneously underestimating the benefits of sustainability investments by failing to account for their effects on common goods (Francesco Sarracino).
A more normative line of critique questions whether some sustainability concerns should be evaluated using aggregated wellbeing metrics at all. Giulia Slater argues that long-term environmental harms may be insufficiently reflected in current wellbeing data despite their potentially irreversible nature. In contexts characterised by complex systems, long time scales, and high uncertainty, optimisation based on predicted wellbeing outcomes may be inappropriate. In this case, conservation rationales or precautionary approaches may offer more robust guidance (Chris Barrington-Leigh).
At the same time, panel members who rejected the statement caution against interpreting the limitations as grounds for abandoning CWA altogether. Paul Frijters suggests that the appropriate response is to improve the measurement of natural capital and sustainability outcomes. CWA can be viewed as a necessary, though not sufficient, input in sustainability evaluations (Mohsen Joshanloo), as it, despite its shortcomings, offers a preferable alternative to willingness-to-pay measures by focusing more directly on human flourishing (Mariano Rojas). Arthur Grimes likewise views CWA as a conceptually comprehensive tool capable of accounting for all relevant costs and benefits, provided that key parameters, such as discount rates, are treated transparently and supplemented with scenario analysis under conditions of uncertainty.
Wellbeing Statement 2:
A majority of panel members (13/21) agrees that “It is acceptable for policymakers to pursue environmental sustainability policies even when these may lead to reductions in overall subjective well-being for the foreseeable future.” Disagreement (5/21) centers less on the ethical acceptability of such trade-offs per se than on uncertainty, political legitimacy, distributional consequences, and the framing of the statement itself.
Several panelists, like Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, argue that once the wellbeing of future generations is taken seriously, short-run reductions in current subjective well-being can be ethically justified. Or as Francesco Sarracino puts it: “Doing the opposite would be equivalent to keep playing the violin on the sinking Titanic.” If welfare is defined only over present individuals, policies that irreversibly damage the environment could improve welfare now, an outcome that is ethically untenable. Assigning positive weight to the wellbeing of future generations therefore makes some short-term losses acceptable in exchange for long-term gains (Anthony Lepinteur). However, how to weigh the concerns of future generations against those of the current generation is a question of fairness (Martin Binder). Similar reasoning is given by Mohsen Joshanloo, who emphasises that an explicit trade-off may be necessary to protect future welfare and avoid irreversible damage.
Caution against accepting current wellbeing losses was expressed when future environmental benefits are highly uncertain. Gigi Foster emphasises the unreliability of long-term forecasts, and the risk that promised gains will fail to materialise, while Paul Frijters stresses that such trade-offs are unjustified in the absence of having good measures of environmental sustainability.
On the contrary, prioritizing current wellbeing at the expense of future generations risks imposing irreversible harm on those who have no voice in present decisions (Francesco Sarracino). If we continue to prioritize current wellbeing at the expense of future generations’ wellbeing, the consequences may ultimately threaten the planet's viability and human survival (Martijn Hendriks). Mariano Rojas argues that reductions in wellbeing may be acceptable when they fall primarily on high-wellbeing populations with historically large ecological footprints, in order to enable wellbeing gains for lower-wellbeing populations with much smaller environmental impacts.
Drawing on Real Options Theory, Arthur Grimes argues that when environmental harm is potentially irreversible, and decisions can be revised as knowledge improves, it may be optimal to accept temporary reductions in well-being to preserve future options. This is because precautionary restrictions can later be reversed, whereas irreversible losses cannot. Conal Smith adds that much depends on whether wellbeing losses refer to average or the sum of wellbeing, and on how far into the future the term “foreseeable” extends; tolerating short-term declines may preserve option value for generations beyond the foreseeable planning horizon. Invoking the idea that “everything is connected,” Chris Barrington-Leigh interprets this perspective as an expression of the inevitable ignorance policymakers face when dealing with complex, long-term, and highly uncertain systems.
Giulia Slater states that short-run losses may be acceptable if policies are evidence-based and accompanied by measures to mitigate and fairly distribute adjustment costs, such as targeted compensation or just transition measures. William Tov adds that, for wellbeing-informed policy to retain credibility, policymakers must engage seriously with mitigation strategies. Without clear plans to reduce or offset wellbeing losses, appeals to wellbeing risk becoming politically meaningless.
A final set of responses challenges the premise that sustainability policies necessarily reduce wellbeing, as pro-environmental behaviours are often prosocial and may increase subjective wellbeing rather than reduce it (Wenceslao Unanue). Dan Haybron adds that sustainability policies should not be assessed in isolation: while some may reduce wellbeing in the short run, the alternative, insufficient action on sustainability, is likely to result in far greater wellbeing losses over time. Daniel Benjamin notes that subjective wellbeing is not equivalent to wellbeing more broadly, and that policies improving broader dimensions of wellbeing may remain acceptable even if measured subjective wellbeing declines. “If the public chooses to invest in the environment and subjective well-being goes down as a consequence, perhaps we are using the wrong subjective well-being metric." (Kelsey O'Connor)
Read the full responses for many more details and insights.