You can measure almost anything with money, provided you're careful about it. That's how insurance companies evaluate risk without loosing money. In the case of

You can measure almost anything with money, provided you're careful about it. That's how insurance companies evaluate risk without loosing money. In the case of disasters, it's really quite simple. Somebody has to pay for the damages (incl. life insurance, medical bills, etc.), and you can estimate these costs fairly accurately if you have enough data. I'm not saying that all values can be compared to monetary value. There are (or may be, depending on your viewpoint) certain kinds of value that are hard to translate to monetary value, for example those that are based on merely ordinal comparisons, those that are highly subjective and for which at the same time there is no market and it makes no sense to assume one, or those that involve context-dependent preferences or other non-standard features like non-transitive preferences with semiorder or interval order representations. However, those rarely play a role in policy making where every implementation of a policy has a cost and different budgets need to be brought into some reasonable equilibrium.