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The Cost of Environmental Degradation
• The European Commission (2006a) quantified the direct damages to public infrastructure. None of these studies focused on estimating the damages to the environment. As of April 2007, only the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) had carried out environmental assessments of the damage (UNDP 2007; UNEP 2007). These studies illuminated several important aspects of the environmental degradation; however, none of them measured the associated costs in monetary terms. To bridge this gap, the World Bank (2007) conducted an economic assessment of the environmental damage caused by the hostilities. The next sections summarize the valuations of (a) the impacts of the oil spill on the coast and (b) the impacts of the hostilities on the waste sector—the two most important areas of environmental damage caused by the 2006 conflict in Lebanon. It is important to note that this analysis was undertaken between October 2006 and April 2007. Several changes may have occurred since then, entailing potential changes in the estimated damage costs.
The Oil Spill On July 13 and 15, 2006, bombs hit the storage tanks of the Jiyeh power utility, located 30 kilometers south of Beirut—storage tanks that contained approximately 44,000 tons2 of stored intermediate fuel oil (IFO).3 As a result, about 12,000 to 15,000 tons of oil spilled into the Mediterranean Sea, and the rest burned, according to communications with the Lebanese Ministry of Environment (MOE) in 2007. Photo 6.1 shows aerial views of the Jiyeh station’s tank area before and after the bombings. Photo 6.1
Jiyeh Electrical Power Station and Tanks
a. Before the July 2006 bombings
Source: Google Earth.
b. After the July 2006 bombings
Source: Lebanon MOE.