TY - JOUR
T1 - Health Impacts of Climate Change as Contained in Economic Models Estimating the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide
AU - Cromar, Kevin
AU - Howard, Peter
AU - Vásquez, Váleri N.
AU - Anthoff, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This work partially was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) under NSF cooperative agreement GEO-1240507. It was also supported in part by the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. The Authors. GeoHealth published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - The health impacts of climate change are substantial and represent a primary motivating factor to mitigate climate change. However, the health impacts in economic models that estimate the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) have generally been made in isolation from health experts and have never been rigorously evaluated. Version 3.10 of the Framework for Uncertainty, Negotiation and Distribution (FUND) model was used to estimate the health-based portion of current SC-CO2 estimates across low-, middle-, and high-income regions. In addition to the base model, three additional experiments assessed the sensitivity of these estimates to changes in the socio-economic assumptions in the model. Economic impacts from adverse health outcomes represent ∼8.7% of current SC-CO2 estimates. The majority of these health impacts (74%) were attributable to diarrhea mortality (from both low- and high-income regions) followed by diarrhea morbidity (12%) and malaria mortality (11%); no other health impact makes a meaningful contribution to SC-CO2 estimates in current economic models. The results of the socio-economic experiments show that the health-based portion of SC-CO2 estimates are highly sensitive to assumptions regarding income elasticity of health effects, income growth, and use of equity weights. Improving the health-based portion of SC-CO2 estimates could have substantial impacts on magnitude of the SC-CO2. Incorporating additional health impacts not previously included in estimates of SC-CO2 will be a critical component of model updates. This effort will be most successful through coordination between economists and health researchers and should focus on updating the form and function of concentration-response functions.
AB - The health impacts of climate change are substantial and represent a primary motivating factor to mitigate climate change. However, the health impacts in economic models that estimate the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) have generally been made in isolation from health experts and have never been rigorously evaluated. Version 3.10 of the Framework for Uncertainty, Negotiation and Distribution (FUND) model was used to estimate the health-based portion of current SC-CO2 estimates across low-, middle-, and high-income regions. In addition to the base model, three additional experiments assessed the sensitivity of these estimates to changes in the socio-economic assumptions in the model. Economic impacts from adverse health outcomes represent ∼8.7% of current SC-CO2 estimates. The majority of these health impacts (74%) were attributable to diarrhea mortality (from both low- and high-income regions) followed by diarrhea morbidity (12%) and malaria mortality (11%); no other health impact makes a meaningful contribution to SC-CO2 estimates in current economic models. The results of the socio-economic experiments show that the health-based portion of SC-CO2 estimates are highly sensitive to assumptions regarding income elasticity of health effects, income growth, and use of equity weights. Improving the health-based portion of SC-CO2 estimates could have substantial impacts on magnitude of the SC-CO2. Incorporating additional health impacts not previously included in estimates of SC-CO2 will be a critical component of model updates. This effort will be most successful through coordination between economists and health researchers and should focus on updating the form and function of concentration-response functions.
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U2 - 10.1029/2021GH000405
DO - 10.1029/2021GH000405
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113564391
VL - 5
JO - GeoHealth
JF - GeoHealth
SN - 2471-1403
IS - 8
M1 - e2021GH000405
ER -