Health and Wellbeing Research at IIASA Workshop

Gregor Kiesewetter: Air Pollution Co-benefits of Climate Change Mitigation: Case Studies with GAINS

Air pollution is the leading environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, with fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) accounting for most of the impacts (~3-8 million annual premature deaths). Furthermore, exposure to PM_2.5 is responsible for a high burden of morbidity from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, which has economic costs through hospitalization and care costs, loss of labor productivity, and disutility costs. Since greenhouse gases and air pollutants share many common sources, in particular fossil fuel combustion, climate change mitigation measures can have substantial health benefits through reduced exposure to air pollution. I will show examples of recent research applying the Greenhouse Gas – Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model to analyse health impacts from PM_2.5, costs of inaction on air pollution, and co-benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation policies for countries in Asia. Future directions include: assessing morbidity effects, moving beyond short term effects (i.e. emergency room admissions) to incorporate longer term effects.

Daniela Weber: Breathing Clean Air, Remembering Better - Daniela Weber 

Air quality is a critical environmental concern that poses significant health risks to populations worldwide. Therefore, air pollution's impact on the cognitive health of older adults has gained attention as an urgent global concern. This study addresses a critical research gap by investigating the association between air pollution, particulate matter (PM10), and episodic memory in older adults across various European regions. 

Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a comprehensive panel study on health and aging, this research employs multilevel modeling to explore the episodic memory consequences of varying air quality. Older adults are a particularly vulnerable subpopulation, and with their increasing representation in populations, understanding the factors influencing their cognitive health has never been more pertinent. 

The study reveals that while individual factors like education or contextual factors such as development or societal equality have been recognized as influential for episodic memory, the role of environmental factors remains underexplored. This study bridges the gap by focusing on the impact of air pollution. Our preliminary results show that exposure to PM10 has a significant detrimental effect on the cognitive performance of older adults, especially for lower educated women.   The study also found that age reduces risk.

This research aims at providing valuable insights for public health policies and interventions aimed at preserving cognitive well-being in aging populations. Understanding the cognitive implications of air pollution is essential for addressing the challenges posed by the aging global population, ultimately promoting a higher quality of life for older adults in Europe and beyond. 

Leila Niamir: Demand-side Solutions to Climate Change Mitigation Consistent with High levels of Well-being 

Mitigation solutions are often evaluated in terms of costs and greenhouse gas reduction potentials, missing out on the consideration of direct effects on human well-being. Here, we systematically assess the mitigation potential of demand-side options categorized into avoid, shift and improve, and their human well-being links. We show that these options, bridging socio-behavioural, infrastructural and technological domains, can reduce counterfactual sectoral emissions by 40–80% in end-use sectors. Based on expert judgement and an extensive literature database, we evaluate 306 combinations of well-being outcomes and demand-side options, finding largely beneficial effects in improvement in well-being (79% positive, 18% neutral and 3% negative), even though we find low confidence on the social dimensions of well-being. Implementing such nuanced solutions is based axiomatically on an understanding of malleable rather than fixed preferences, and procedurally on changing infrastructures and choice architectures. Results demonstrate the high mitigation potential of demand-side mitigation options that are synergistic with well-being. 

source: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01219-y

Shonali Pachauri: The Impacts of Household Energy Transitions on Health and Health Equity

Energy transitions involve the substitution of a series of energy sources and energy-using technologies with others, often entailing a shift from lower to higher quantities and qualities of energy services. These transitions can have unequal social, health, and spatial impacts. In this presentation, I will elaborate on research conducted at IIASA aimed at comprehending the health and health equity impacts of transitioning from solid and liquid fuels, as well as inefficient energy-using household devices, to superior quality energy carriers and devices, while enhancing energy services. Some of this work explicitly examines whether disadvantaged groups, distinguished by race, gender, religion, age, income, etc., experience proportionate benefits from such transitions compared to others. 

Early research conducted at IIASA was focused on estimating the health impacts of transitioning from solid fuels such as firewood, charcoal, and coal, primarily used for household cooking and heating, to more efficient energy sources or devices (e.g., more efficient stoves), utilizing WHO Comparative Risk Assessment methodologies^1,2,3. Prior research also assessed the health benefits of transitioning from liquid fuel-based lanterns to electric lighting^4,5. More recent work has explored whether such transitions in household fuels and devices improve health equity, in addition to positively impacting the general health of the population, including the health of low-income individuals⁶, children⁷, and women of African descent⁸. 

Future plans include:

• Looking at vulnerability of heat exposure; and access to cooling technologies
• Access to decent living standards more broadly – how it affects health disparities under a changing climate
• Considering access to health services and how this affects health impacts
• Compare different energy transition pathways in terms of health impacts for different groups

Aneequen Javaid: Sustainable Transport and Health

Transport is at the centre of many sustainability concerns. Transport systems are responsible for at least a tenth of global anthropogenic GHG emissions, and in major urban centres, they are a main source of air pollution directly impacting health at local level. They structure daily life of commuters, residents, and children, providing access to multiple services, and are associated in outcome and process with wellbeing.   Thus motivated, our group looks at the multiple challenges facing the transport sector employing different methods and conceptual frameworks to study those issues. Broadly speaking our work falls under four major categories: 

Transport sector modelling 

• Development of Transport sector energy model (MESSAGEix-Transport) that also has the potential to capture global transportation sector, with a particular focus on sector decarbonization pathways.   

• We are especially interested in developing transport relevant scenarios that move away from narrow focus on decarbonization pathways but rather include more well-being oriented considerations. 

Polic design and analysis: 

• Meta-analysis and systematic review of behavioural interventions to promote “sustainable transport modes”, including interventions that come from health perspective (not just limited to promotion of physical activity). 

• The effectiveness of promoting sustainable mobility options using air pollution reduction framing as compared to economic or social value of sustainable mobility options 

• Impact of mobility infrastructure on women´s economic and health prospects   

Transport and urban system analysis 

• On-going work on systematic review on the “well-being related impacts (health, economic, mobility) of Bus rapid transit provision in Asia and Africa 

• Urban form impacts on sustainable mobility across cities in EU 

Conceptual and empirical analysis of concepts and phenomenon around sustainable, well-being oriented mobility systems 

• On going work on bottom-up understanding of Decent mobility standards 

• The potential of demand-side measures such as lifestyle changes in achieving sustainable mobility goals

Michael Kuhn: Modelling Long-term Behavioural Responses along the Health-Climate Nexus

Climate change yields a significant health burden, which in turn translates into a significant economic burden. Notably, even for short-term health impacts (e.g. as consequence of disasters) these burdens translate into long-term macroeconomic impacts through reductions in the labour force and diminished scope for investment (as shown by Bloom et al. (2021) for the  macroeconomic burden of ill health in general). Possibly even more importantly, by changing individuals’  functional capabilities; household wealth and income; and outlook and expectations ill-health effects of climate change may alter people’s long-term-oriented behaviours. Specifically, they may compromise people’s savings as well as their investments in human capital (Frankovic, 2017; Borghi and Kuhn, 2024). Together with any direct climate damages, health impacts then yield an economic cost, which is not only short-term in nature, but bears significant long-term consequences. In this presentation, we are presenting a model that allows to analyse the nexus between climate change and long-term health behaviours, present some illustrative findings and discuss directions into which this model can be developed for a more complete understanding of the health-climate nexus and an integrated assessment of the social cost of carbon and the value of health. We also highlight scope for inter-program research such as e.g. on the empirical demographic and epidemiological foundation of the model; its possible role in informing (and being informed) by scenario analysis; and its linkage/integration with other IIASA models.  

Qinhan Zhu: Examining and Enabling the Triple Dividend of Climate Resilience Policies under the Lens of Health

Climate risk management in developing countries faces the ongoing challenge of limited financial resources and less tangible economic outcomes. This research operationalizes the Triple Dividend Framework to identify and quantify the co-benefits of implementing climate risk management strategies in these countries. The non-economic benefits primarily relate to improvements in health and ecosystem services.

The study makes three key contributions to understanding the synergy between climate risk management and health outcomes. First, through a review of existing literature and empirical evidence, it highlights various health benefits from national climate risk management strategies, such as reduced injuries, improved nutrition, and better-protected health infrastructure. These findings encourage governments to implement more comprehensive policies to address climate hazards. Second, the study develops macroeconomic and fiscal models to assess the opportunity costs of investing in climate adaptation. By comparing different policy approaches—ranging from those focused solely on food relief to those emphasizing disaster management—the models aim to suggest the most viable strategies for resource-constrained governments. Finally, the research proposes new financing instruments that integrate both health and disaster finance. By fostering these synergies, international development agencies can promote more effective, resilient, and health-oriented development in vulnerable countries.

Overall, the study seeks to provide a more holistic understanding of the role of climate risk management in promoting sustainable development, emphasizing the importance of health co-benefits in assessing the effectiveness of these strategies.

Yazhen Wu: Integrated Health Impact Assessments: Holistic Planning Considering Pollution-, Climate-, and Diet-related Disease Burden

Global socioeconomic and environmental challenges, as well as the induced health impacts, are estimated to affect human wellbeing in an intertwined manner.  For example, a thread of studies estimating and projecting the disease burden from exposure to air pollution, including those evaluating the avoided premature mortality and associated economic and welfare benefits as direct benefits of air pollution control or as co-benefits of climate change mitigation efforts. There is also a thread of studies quantifying the disease burden induced by the changing climate, either as gradual climate change or the induced extreme events. Similarly, another thread of studies focused on diet-related health impacts, including the health risk of undernourishment which may be either alleviated or exacerbated under the changing environment and policies addressing climate and food security risks. These disease burdens are also closely interlinked – for instance, policies to mitigation climate change through land-based mitigation options might simultaneously affect the severity of warming levels, air pollutant emissions, and food availability and undernourishment.

However, to date, studies that address several multiple health risks factors in integrated and systematic ways are still rare. The health impacts or health benefits from individual driver or policies are rarely assessed or compared with other disease burdens in the context of multiple health risks. This may lead to incomplete cost-benefit analysis framework, and the omissions of important synergies in integrated policy plannings. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the cost of actions and cost of inactions considering the multiple health impacts. In the flash talk, I would like to discuss the importance of integrated assessment of different environmental-related or behavior-related health risks, and the importance of developing a framework to compare the disease burden and economic consequences of different health impacts.

Yuliya Kulikova: Health and Human Capital Production, Intergenerational Mobility and Health Policies 

 Each year the U.S. government spends about 2% of its GDP on Medicaid, its main means-tested health insurance program. In June 2013, over 28 million children were enrolled in Medicaid. What are the implications of such a large-scale policy intervention for intergenerational mobility and inequality? While the role of education and education policies received a lot of attention in the literature on intergenerational mobility, almost nothing is known on how medical policies affect intergenerational mobility and inequality. This is rather surprising, since health, like education, is highly persistent across generations and health of children have an important impact on how they perform in school. In this paper, I develop and estimate a human-capital based overlapping generations model of household decisions that take into account multidimensionality and dynamic nature of human capital investments. I distinguish two forms of human capital: health capital and human capital, and model explicitly government policies in education and health. The counterfactual simulations show that health policies are an important determinant of intergenerational mobility of income across generations for agents of the bottom of income distribution and there are important interactions between health and education policies. 

Nikita Strelkovskii, Rotem Zelingher, Leena Ilmola-Sheppard, Elena Rovenskaya: Systems Approach to National Well-being: Integrating Causal Loop Diagrams and Exploratory Data Analysis

As nations increasingly recognize the importance of multi-dimensional well-being in assessing societal progress, it is becoming crucial to understand complex interconnections among various well-being dimensions and how these interconnections define well-being outcomes of policies and shocks. This presentation combines two complementary approaches to provide a comprehensive view of national well-being systems: causal loop diagrams (CLDs) and exploratory data analysis. 

First, we present a generic qualitative CLD developed for the well-being components introduced in the OECD How's Life report. These components encompass economic, social, human, and natural capital dimensions of national well-being. The CLD-based approach reveals the prevalence of indirect effects and feedback loops among various national well-being components. To illustrate the applicability of the well-being CLD, we demonstrate its application in the context of COVID-19 mitigation policies, incorporating links between interventions aimed at curbing the spread of the pandemic, and national well-being components. This CLD contains a total of 35 causal links between eight aggregated COVID-19 mitigation policies and 31 national well-being indicators, as well as 134 causal links between the indicators themselves. All these components and links are supported by literature. This analysis demonstrates how specific interventions, such as lockdowns, can have widespread impacts across multiple well-being dimensions. 

Second, we showcase findings from our exploratory data analysis of OECD How's Life indicators across multiple countries. Using correlation analysis, time series clustering, and panel data analysis, we identify two distinct country clusters exhibiting different well-being patterns over time. Our analysis also demonstrates how major events like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic altered these clusters, reflecting their impact on national well-being. 

By combining these two approaches, we strive towards a nuanced understanding of the National Well-being System. This combined methodology can offer valuable insights for policymakers aiming to develop informed and impactful well-being policies, maximize synergies, and navigate potential trade-offs in promoting citizens' quality of life. 

Romain Clercq-Roques: Biodiversity and Health: Overview of Pathways and Methods 

This presentation will present the multiple pathways between biodiversity and health, exploring the varied role of food systems, land uses, vector ecology, biomedical discoveries and more. Then, the presentation will underline the value of adopting a complex system approach to understand the complex and context-dependent links between biodiversity and health, and present relevant methods which can identify the potential synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity and health. The presentation will highlight the value of participatory and transdisciplinary approaches to ensure that the research is rigorous and redress power imbalances. Biodiversity conservation policies face important ethical challenges which need to be addressed upfront. Finally, the presentation will briefly touch upon the necessity to address biodiversity, health and climate in an integrated manner.

Rastislav Skalsky: Large-scale Gridded Crop Models in Support of Analyzing Sustainable Food Systems for Human Health (an outlook). 

Nutrition is an important factor framing the health condition of human populations. This is even more emphasized in low-income societies where proper nutrition could, along with directly investing to health care, significantly improve general conditions for population health. Global and regional gridded crop models (GGCM) have traditionally been employed in variety of impact studies addressing food security and crop production sustainability under changing climates, socio-economic developments, or both, focusing mainly on amount of produced biomass used as food. Less explored dimension of GGCMs utilization is analyzing qualitative aspects of crop production, and how nutritional value of produced crop yield could be impacted by changing climate and farmer’s actions at a crop field driven mutually by site suitability and socio-economic conditions, including decisions on type and number of crops cultivated (e.g., share of commercial, local food/staple, and fodder crops). Explicit quantitative information about nutrient composition of crop yield, such as protein, fat, or carbohydrate content which is directly relevant for evaluating quality of human diets, is usually absent or underrepresented in currently used GGCMs. Fully accepting this actual limitation, we still see a possibility of utilizing EPIC-IIASA (a GGCM framework operated by IIASA) in integrated evaluation frameworks as a source of geospatially explicit and dynamic quantitative indicators for estimating nutritional values of crops produced under variety of regional or local conditions. Underpinned by recent developments of data-driven algorithms capable of rapid emulation of process-based model outputs and their dynamic integration with other models and data, EPIC-IIASA could possibly be approximated to better represent also qualitative aspects of crop production. 

Felicity Addo: Securing Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems in The Gambia

The Gambia faces significant challenges in ensuring sufficient and nutritious food for its population due to rising food demand and the increasing threats posed by climate change. The country's agricultural sector is predominantly rain-fed, making it highly vulnerable to climate impacts. This vulnerability is particularly pronounced among the rural poor, who rely heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods and are therefore more susceptible to food insecurity, poverty, malnutrition, and related health issues.

To address these challenges, our study aimed to assess whether The Gambia's domestic food production could meet future food demands while avoiding further deforestation and land degradation. We adapted the FABLE Calculator, a food and land-use system model, to simulate various scenarios specifically tailored to The Gambia. These scenarios were co-developed with local and international stakeholders, ensuring that the analysis was grounded in the country's unique context. The model accounted for the impacts of climate change on crop yields, the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices, and the potential benefits of increased fertilizer use and irrigation on crop productivity.

The analysis revealed that, under current practices, domestic food production on existing cropland will be insufficient to meet national food demand by 2050, resulting in a significant supply-demand gap. However, our findings suggest that investments in fertilizer availability and the development of sustainable irrigation infrastructure could substantially increase crop productivity. Furthermore, the adoption of climate-resilient crop varieties and optimized planting schedules could reduce the supply-demand gap by approximately half. Despite these improvements, the measures alone will not fully close the gap, necessitating additional strategies such as expanding cropland, prioritizing the production of domestic food crops over export-oriented crops, or increasing food imports.

To secure food supplies in The Gambia amid growing demand and climate change challenges, it is crucial to implement policies that promote nutritional security through healthy and sustainable diets. These policies will require a significant boost in domestic agricultural production, either through improved yields, expanded agricultural land, or increased imports. Enhancing agricultural productivity will also depend on policies that provide farmers with access to fertilizers, reduce water stress, and encourage the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices. Additionally, investing in climate-smart technologies that enhance productivity and resilience is essential for reducing dependence on imports while ensuring sustainable and healthy diets.

Finally, given the critical role of imports in The Gambia’s food supply, it is essential to ensure a robust and diversified flow of food imports by addressing regional trade barriers and expanding trade partnerships. By co-developing resilient food and land-use systems with stakeholders, The Gambia can better align the demand for sustainable, healthy food with a realistic and achievable food supply. This approach requires sustained investment and comprehensive policy support to build a resilient food system capable of withstanding the challenges posed by climate change and population growth

Elisa Stefaniak: bloom: Biodiversity and Land-use Objectives for Optimal Management  

Health, both from an anthropocentric and eco-centric point of view, is vital to societal resilience and wellbeing. As demonstrated by the 2013-2016 West-Africa Ebola epidemic and the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic, emergent zoonotic diseases can lead to large loss of life and severe disruptions to the health and economic systems, with impacts exacerbated for vulnerable populations. Currently, management of outbreaks relies on early detection and then rapid response systems including public health and government interventions and novel medical developments. However, due to rapidly increasing biodiversity loss, land use change and climate change, the risk and likelihood of zoonoses is rising, and post-outbreak responses may become even more challenging. Hence, to prevent increasing loss of lives and livelihoods, science and practice should focus more strongly on developing and implementing proactive interventions before a spillover event occurs.     

To address this gap in research and policy, the new IIASA Strategic Innitiative project starting in 2025 proposes to develop a linked-model framework to evaluate how the impact of local economic activity and policy on ecosystems translates into a zoonotic hazard which in turn feeds back on local populations and economies. We will show how, using the Ebola epidemic as a case study, we will create a modelling system which will build on ongoing IIASA research (e.g., RESIST, Rainforest) into ecosystem resilience, disease modelling and economic risks, and combine existing IIASA tools (e.g., PlantFATE) to explore optimal strategies for ecosystem management and disease mitigation.