Since July of 1991, I have worked to value natural resources and their services. Why would anyone want to place a price tag on the environment? Well, in the Damage Assessment Center at NOAA we use this information in combination with natural science and legal research to prepare legal claims against parties who harm the environment. NOAA and other natural resource trustees conduct Natural Resource Damage Assessments for oil spills, hazardous waste discharges, boat groundings on coral reefs, and other harmful actions where the law permits us to claim damages on behalf of the public.

Trustees then use the recovered money to restore natural resources to baseline conditions and implement other environmental restoration actions to compensate for resource services that are lost pending recovery. The difficult task of estimating values for natural resource services requires an understanding of economic modeling techniques and of computer programs used for estimation of economic models. In fact, virtually all specialized fields in economics (public finance, international economics, etc.) require a strong foundation in mathematics, with a special emphasis on calculus, probability, and statistics.

In the years since I wrote my original career profile, the old cliché applies: the more things change, the more they stay the same. I still have the same job title (economist), and I still work at NOAA. There have been plenty of changes underlying these simple statements, however.