Page - 211 - in Loss and Damage from Climate Change - Concepts, Methods and Policy Options

8 Non-economicLossandDamageand theWarsaw… 211 communicationof the relevanceofnon-economicvalues for thoseaffectedby their potential loss particularly challenging. Instruments aimed at avoiding or respond- ing to non-economic losseswithin a centralised setting like theUNFCCCneed to be able to accommodate such context-dependence of non-economicvalues.Rather than relyingonafinite set of indicators, standardisedassessment rules coulddeter- minewhatwouldbeofficiallyrecognizedaslossofnon-economicvaluesthatmerits international attentionandaction (Serdecznyet al. 2016a). 8.3.2 Incommensurability Most non-economic values are considered to be incommensurable. According to (Chang2013)“[p]erhapsthemostfrequentlyrecurringideathatfallsunderthelabel ‘theincommensurabilityofvalues’isthatvalueslackacommonunitofmeasurement” (p.5).Thismeansthatwhileindividualitemsmightbecomparableintermsofpriority or importance ranking or according to an imprecise unit, they cannot bemeasured ononeunitaryscale. Incontrast, ifallvaluescouldbeexpressedbyoneunitaryunit, thenthedifferencebetweenthemwouldbemerelyoneofquantity.Changillustrates suchacase: Forexample, if thevalueofone’schildcanbemeasuredby thesameunit thatmeasures the value of a beach vacation, then our attitudes toward the loss of value of each should be a matter of degree. Insofar as our practical attitudes are driven by the value of their objects, our attitudes toward our children should differ fromour attitudes toward beach vacations only inquantity, not inquality. (Chang2013:6) A standard unitary unit of value is amonetary numéraire.Monetisation, as the process of assigningmonetary values, effectively puts all values on one scale and expressestheirdifferenceasoneinquantity.Whichvaluesareconsideredincommen- surable is culturally contingent andmay change over time. For example,while the valueofecosystemsisfrequentlyexpressedinmonetaryterms(Sukhdevetal.2014), someraiseobjections tosuchvaluationandquestionthebenefitsofmonetisationfor biodiversityconservation (e.g.Gomez-BaggethunandRuiz-Perez2011). Conceptually speakingmonetisation as a valuation technique is thus not com- patiblewith the incommensurabilityofvalue.Consequently, if incommensurability ofnon-economicvalues is respected thenalternativemeansofvaluation, aswell as communication andweighting of values are needed. This presents a challenge to decision-makingparticularly insystemswherecost-benefitanalysesaredrawnupon as theprimarymethod fordecision-making (seeBox8.1).