Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Climate action - through mitigation and adaptation - holds the potential to deliver significant health benefits, including increased life expectancy, improved quality of life, and enhanced well-being. Despite this potential, there is no standardised best practice guidelines to quantify these health impacts and assess the cost-effectiveness of climate action interventions through economic evaluation frameworks. This review seeks to address this gap by analysing literature from health and environmental economics that assess the economic value of health co-benefits from climate actions. The objective is to guide policymakers toward adopting consistent and evidence-based methods to prioritize interventions that yield environmental and health co-benefits.
METHODS: A systematic literature review of peer-reviewed literature was conducted using a machine learning prioritisation tool to explore the research landscape on the economic evaluation of health impacts arising from climate action. Policy reports and grey literature were also reviewed. Methodological frameworks from health and environmental economics were compared to evaluate their respective strengths, limitations, and gaps in capturing the health co-benefits in climate action assessments.
RESULTS: 43,665 peer-reviewed documents were retrieved from the search strategy, with 32,616 assessed at screening, and 95 included at full-text extraction. A further 17 reports were included through grey literature. Findings suggest that health economics provides detailed and robust methodologies for quantifying health outcomes, but these methods are often underutilised in climate action evaluations. Conversely, environmental economics offers a broader assessment of climate impacts but frequently lacks standardised and rigorous health metrics aligned with health economics frameworks.
CONCLUSIONS: This study lays the groundwork for advancing economic evaluations of the health impacts from climate action. By integrating approaches from health and environmental economics, the findings aim to inform policymakers in designing evidence-based, systematic, and coherent climate policies, reflecting both economic and health benefits.