Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Integrated assessment models (IAMs) translate climate change into monetary damages and are used to compute the social cost of carbon (SCC). Two gaps are particularly salient for health economics. First, most SCC-health modules emphasize mortality, thereby omitting climate-related welfare losses from non-fatal morbidity. Second, climate change is not only a shift in mean temperature; emissions may also affect the variability of climate conditions, which can independently influence health but is rarely captured in SCC accounting. This paper develops a modular health-damage component that can be compared with, and integrated into, incumbent SCC frameworks.
METHODS: In a baseline two-stage approach, I estimate temperature-health relationships using disability-adjusted life years (DALYs, collected in the Global Burden of Disease Database) for climate-sensitive disease groups and map DALY losses to emissions via an emissions-temperature linkage. As a robustness check, I estimate the climate linkage using a simultaneous mean-variance (SMV) specification that jointly models how global carbon conditions shift both the drift (mean) and diffusion (variance) of temperature, and I propagate these changes into DALY outcomes. I then translate DALY impacts into monetary values under multiple valuation rules and discuss sensitivity and equity pitfalls that arise when applying country-specific valuation tools rather than globally standardized welfare weights.
RESULTS: Evaluated at the 2019 baseline burdens and valued at $100,000 per DALY-year, the implied annualized health SCC for the total non-fatal component of 4 critical disease groups (vector-borne, mental, cardiovascular, and chronic respiratory) is about $7.82 per ton CO₂ emission with a 6.7% variability premium with the SMV model.
CONCLUSIONS: The goal is not to replace IAMs, but to provide a transparent health module that expands SCC accounting beyond mortality-only endpoints and clarifies the role of climate variability in health damages. My approach covers untapped features valued at approximately 15% of incumbent SCC standards, thereby bridging both morbidity and variability gaps.