Menon Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics (MERE) is the leading centre of competence in the area of non-market valuation of environment, health and cultural heritage

MERE works in the area of economic analysis of policies, programs and projects that affect important public goods such as climate and the environment, nature, health and cultural heritage. Central to this work is the use of methods to quantify, assess and value the contribution of such goods to people’s welfare. An important aim is to improve the foundations for public and private decision-making by including knowledge of the complete range of impacts of different alternatives in a coherent way, for example within a cost-benefit analysis framework.

MERE is involved in a number of projects that for example assesses the public benefits of cultural heritage, health impacts from air pollution and noise in Nordic cities, landscape impacts from different locations of wind energy parks, transmission lines and fish farming along the Norwegian coast, oil spill risks from coastal transport, the benefits of parks in urban areas, the benefits of cleaning up contaminated sediments in Norwegian harbours, and impacts on ecosystem services from a number of transport infrastructure projects. We also apply the same non-market valuation methods to assess benefits of other public goods, where there are no markets and prices to signal their value.

MERE cooperates broadly and with many disciplines and has ongoing project activities within most sectors, including transport, oil and energy, trade and commerce, forestry, tourism, health, natural resource management and cultural heritage. We also have extensive cooperation internationally and have a number of ongoing environment and development projects in developing countries.