In short
Climate change constitutes an imminent threat to Europe, with environmental stressors such as air pollution and noise impacting health and causing disease. To improve the well-being of future generations, European countries need to prioritise policies that aim to contrast the current course of events and that are based on up-to-date evidence. To address this need, we develop within the EU-funded BEST-COST project a framework for assessing the socio-economic impact and disease burden of environmental stressors. The framework consists of different open access tools that estimate the burden of disease, socio-economic cost and social inequalities with respect to environmental stressors.
Project description
Air pollution and noise cause a great burden on Europe’s health
Climate change constitutes an imminent threat to Europe, with environmental stressors such as air pollution and noise impacting health and causing diseases. In Europe, air pollution is estimated to lead to 400,000 premature deaths and noise pollution to approximately 12,000 premature deaths. To improve the well-being of future generations, European countries need to prioritise policies that aim to contrast the current course of events and that are based on up-to-date evidence. Currently, evidence-based policymaking on environmental stressors faces methodological challenges to quantify the socioeconomic costs of such impacts and the unequal distribution of these impacts across different communities.
BEST-COST wants to develop a framework for producing evidence on the burden of air pollution and noise
The BEST-COST project provides a solution for producing evidence on the topic. In particular, we aim to develop improved, integrated and consensus methods for assessing the socio-economic impact and disease burden of environmental stressors. The framework consists of open access tools that estimate the burden of disease, socio-economic cost and social inequalities with respect to environmental stressors. Firstly, the work of BEST-COST focuses to improve and harmonise the methods for 1) estimating the health impact, 2) monetizing the burden of disease estimates and 3) assessing the extent of social inequalities of the burden attributable to environmental stressors. The novel methodology will be available via an open access code and tested in five EU countries (Belgium, Estonia, France, Norway, Portugal). Finally, BEST-COST will establish the transferability of these methods towards other environmental stressors and geographical areas.
With the developed framework BEST-COST wants to reach policy-makers, regulators and citizens to better informed them about environmental and socio-economic risk factors. In the future environmental, occupational, social, economic, fiscal and health policies at EU and national level will be increasingly based on solid scientific evidence. As long term impact, the outcomes of BEST-COST is to contribute to the reduction of the burden of disease and environmental inequalities, and to the improvement of living and working environments becoming more health-promoting, equitable and sustainable.
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