Energie- & milieu-informatiesysteem voor het Vlaams Gewest

In June 2001 the BAT centre of Vito (the Flemish Institute for Technological Research) started with the development of an Environmental Costing Model for Flanders.  The Flemish Government aspires the development of a tool to (i) determine the costs of environmental policy and (ii) to contribute to a more efficient environmental policy by indicating how environmental targets can be realised in a cost effective way.

In order to match the aspiration of the Flemish Goverment, the BAT centre has to:

• develop a coherent database with environmental measures, their reduction potential and costs;
• develop a tool to allocate emission reduction efforts between different target groups in a cost effective way;
• develop a tool to take into account multiple pollutant effects;
• develop a tool to analyse the cost effectiveness of policy instruments;
• develop an instrument that can be linked to other models such as ecological models, economic models.

The development of the model is focused on a single criterium: cost effectiveness. Nevertheless, other criteria can play a significant role in determining the environmental policy such as environmental effectiveness and feasibility.  It is important to mention that the Environmental Costing Model is not a tool to carry out an investment analysis for a specific company.