About EVRI

What is EVRI?

The Environmental Valuation Reference Inventory (EVRI) is a searchable compendium of summaries of environmental and health valuation studies. These summaries provide detailed information about the study location, the specific environmental assets being valued, the methodological approaches and the estimated monetary values along with proper contextualization. The EVRI database now contains over 5,000 summaries of valuation studies and information from new studies is being added on an ongoing basis.

How is EVRI useful?

Over the past decades, the volume of literature on the economic value of ecological goods and services has significantly expanded. One arising challenge for academic researchers, economists, and policy analysts is to quickly and efficiently find relevant references of valuation studies amidst the growing volume of available information. Other challenges frequently associated with policy decision-making are time and resource constraints, which may not allow for a primary valuation study to be conducted. Under such constraints, value transfer (using values from a previous valuation study to apply them to another analytical context, with proper adjustments) may represent a cost-effective way to derive defensible environmental valuation estimates.

The primary purpose of EVRI is to facilitate literature review and the application of value transfer techniques for research and policy analysis. The online database was designed to support you in:

  • Quickly finding economic values of ecological goods and services or human health impacts

  • Identifying studies to apply value transfer and generate defensible estimates of values

  • Compile extensive information for meta-analysis

  • Conducting a detailed empirical literature review of environmental valuation studies

  • Exploring and comparing existing economic valuation techniques

How was EVRI developed?

Environment and Climate Change Canada has started developing the EVRI database in the early 1990s, in collaboration with a number of international valuation experts and organizations, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Since the online launch of EVRI in 1997, new valuation literature has steadily been entered into the database, eventually making EVRI the largest database of its kind in the world. The database was initially designed by P. De Civita, F. Filion and J. Frehs (Environment Canada), in consultation with W. Adamowicz, M. Clark, R. Carson, W. Desvousges, M. Jay, V. Kibler, J. Loomis, A. Olivier, M. Podar, R. Rowe, J. Shogren, and M. Welsh.