The Present State and Future Tasks in the Theory and Method of an Evaluation of the Natural Environment and Resources

The needs of optimal resource development policy in the Soviet Union have given rise to a new interdisciplinary research discipline concerned with the evaluation of the physical environment and natural resources. Evaluations are made of particular environments or resources or an integrated natural complex as a whole (the “object” of the evaluation) from the point of view of particular elements of society or society as a whole (the “subject” of the evaluation). Evaluations may be in terms of social utility, economic cost, technological feasibility, or medical-biological requirements. A number of methodological problems remain to be solved in evaluative research: (1) comparability between evaluations of particular elements and of integrated environments or resource complexes, (2) commensurability of various categories of evaluation (social, economic, technological) of a particular type of environment or resource, (3) the problem of weighting individual elements in integrated evaluations; and (4) the question of converting physical measurements into evaluations on a point scale.