The interest and motivation to invest in greening businesses are different from client to client. Sometimes the investments happen because greening business opens new horizons and markets, other times they are required by environmental legislators. In the business environment, one often needs to place cost recovery and ensure profit margins as the main driver for various investment projects that are delivering goods and services, and at other times there needs to be a broader viewpoint looking at the issues of affordability and access. We offer services for both.
Project investment analysis
We have experience in investment analysis of municipal infrastructure projects, especially for modernizing waste management systems. The sector-specific experience allows us to understand the economic drivers and the business models in which these function.
We perform:
- Market research and customer satisfaction studies. For market research and forecasts we use macroeconomic data and sector indicators.
- Analysis of credit worthiness for public and private organizations. Often municipal service operators are publicly owned or funded, or at least the municipality guarantees for investments in infrastructure, therefore credit-worthiness of municipalities is also a requirement.
- Investment analysis, including scenario analysis and prioritizing investment projects and preparing investment and financing plans for the selected investments. Scenario analysis may be carried out based on different variables, such as macroeconomic indicators, size of demand or investment risks.
Environmental economics
In the environmental economics field we perform:
- Pricing and tariffing of environmental services. This service is most relevant for pricing environmental services, such as waste management, waste water treatment, drinking water and district heating. The tariffs have to take into account the cost of the service, the level of affordability, elasticity of demand and opportunities to cross-subsidize between users.
- Analysis of suitability of economic instruments (also known as market based instruments) by recommending suitable instruments to boost the market for achieving certain environmental standards, such as recycling targets, reducing greenhouse gases or biodiversity conservation.
- Assessments of the economic impacts and the economic implications of environmental and social impacts. This service consists of implementing cost benefit analysis to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of investment projects from the point of view of society as a whole. We also implement various methods for monetizing environmental and social impacts including shadow pricing and willingness to pay studies.
- Cost and financing models development. We use our sector-specific experience to build tools that can help decision-makers assess their own costs, practice activity based costing and improve their financial management practices.