Limiting Risk in Environmental Problems:Corporate Budget Constraints and Minimum Involvement

Abstract

For a given opportunity in which a company can invest to perform environmental remediation for profit, the influences of value, cost, success probability, and corporate risk tolerance provide an optimal working interest (OWI) that should be taken to maximize the risk-adjusted value (RAV). When several opportunities are available, but when the total budget is insufficient to take OWI in each, an analytical procedure is undertaken for optimizing the RAV of the total portfolio; the relevant working interests are also derived based on a cost-exposure constraint. Several numerical illustrations will exhibit the use of the method under different budget conditions and with different numbers of available opportunities. The result is that the computations of portfolio balancing can be done quickly using the analytical expressions presented here, thereby providing rapid assessments of environmental opportunities and their worth.