Judged seriousness of environmental losses: reliability and cause of loss

Public judgments of the seriousness of environmental losses were found to be internally consistent for most respondents, and largely unaffected by attempts to manipulate responses by altering the mix of losses being judged. Both findings enhance confidence in the feasibility of developing reliable rankings of the seriousness of environmental losses to aid resource allocation and damage assessment. In addition, seriousness of loss was found to be sensitive to the cause of the loss, with human-caused environmental losses considered more serious than identical losses caused by natural events. This difference has important implications for assessment of environmental losses.