PURPOSE:

Recent decades have seen accelerating global efforts to develop innovative technologies to address climate change and unmet health needs. Economic modeling (e.g., cost-effectiveness analysis, benefit cost analysis) is commonly used in both environmental and health economics to quantify the societal costs and benefits of innovative technologies; both fields share conceptual and technical challenges including dealing with uncertainty in the evidence base in modeling long-term impacts and the extent to which broader societal impacts (e.g., productivity) should be explicitly considered.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together environmental and health economists to share promising methodological approaches used to address the common set of challenges in long-term economic modeling, and identify areas of methodological collaboration to better quantify the societal costs and benefits of climate change-delaying interventions as well as novel health technologies.

DESCRIPTION:

Lotte Steuten will first summarize the significant societal burden from climate change and unmet health needs and outline a common set of challenges in economic modeling (10 minutes). Elizabeth Kopits will discuss how environmental economists address the key challenges in (e.g., discounting, treatment of uncertainty), highlighting promising approaches and areas for methods and data research (10 minutes). Jason Shafrin will draw upon recent advances in health economic modeling (e.g., generalized cost-effectiveness analysis framework) to describe how these methodological advances have allowed health economists to better quantify the impact of outcome uncertainty and long-run dynamics (10 minutes). Meindert Boysen will reflect the similarities and differences in both fields in addressing the common modeling challenges, and propose areas for future collaboration between the two fields (10 minutes). The panel will end with moderated audience Q&A (20 minutes). Polling questions will be used throughout to examine views on the extent to which methodologies widely used in environmental economics would be applicable in the health economics.