Mercantile Value Reduction: Accounting for Stigma on Contaminated Land in Germany # Stephan Bartke* 1 , Reimund Schwarze 1 May 2009 ABSTRACT: The cleanup and reuse of contaminated land carries many risks. The cleanup may be incomplete so that some pollution goes undetected. Some substances in the ground may not be known to be pollutants at the time but turn out to be later. Areas that have been properly decontaminated may still have a depressed market value due to ‘stigma’, i.e. the psychological fear of some negative impact or remaining cost. The phenomenon of stigma on contaminated land has been widely debated in the United States but received little scholarly attention in Europe, although accounting for stigma is a legally approved best practice of appraisal in European countries. This paper surveys international approaches to accounting for stigma on contaminated land, introduces the German setting and procedures, and presents a case study validated risk scoring method of accounting based on a survey of German appraisers. * Corresponding author E-mail: stephan.bartke@ufz.de | Phone: +493412351683 | Fax: +493412351836 1 Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ Department of Economics Permoserstr. 15 | 04318 Leipzig | Germany # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The authors acknowledge financial support from TASK – Center of Competence for Soil, Groundwater and Site Revitalisation – Leipzig, sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig. This paper partly reports results (1) of the BMBF funded research project “Strategies for the Revitalization of Brownfield Areas in the Larger Potsdam Region" (SINBRA) under the REFINA program "Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management” (cf. Bartke and Schwarze 2009a, 2009b) and (2) of the SAFIRA II project, sponsored by the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ.