Improving cost–benefit analyses for health-considered climate mitigation policymaking

Abstract

There is growing discussion about enhancing climate policy efficiency by prioritizing health, with expectations for including health co-benefits in the next round of nationally determined contribution updates. Critical to this effort is the need to compare the benefits to the costs of mitigation. Here we synthesize the current cost-effectiveness of climate policies based on health-included cost–benefit analyses and identify key research challenges and opportunities for scaling up health-considered or even health-centred climate policies. Furthermore, we show factors essential to accelerating the development and implementation of mitigation policies, including providing tangible and policy-relevant health co-benefits, promoting interdisciplinary contributions and cross-sector policy engagement, conducting regional studies and improving inter-study comparability, and exploring health-considered optimized strategies.