Valuing environmental health for informed policy-making
-
Vojtěch Máca
,
Jan Melichar
Abstract
Background:
Monetized environmental health impact assessments help to better evaluate the environmental burden of a wide range of economic activities. Apart from the limitations and uncertainties in physical and biological science used in such assessments, assumptions taken from economic valuation may also substantially influence subsequent policy-making considerations.
Aim:
This study attempts to demonstrate the impact of normative policy assumptions on quantified external costs using a case study of recently discussed variants of future coal mining and use of extracted coal in electricity and heat generation in the Czech Republic.
Methods:
A bottom-up impact-pathway approach is used for quantification of external costs. Several policy perspectives are elaborated for aggregating impacts that differ in geographic coverage and in how valuation of quantified impacts is adjusted in a particular perspective.
Results:
We find that the fraction of monetized external impacts taken into policy-making considerations may vary according to choice of decision perspective up to a factor of 10.
Conclusion:
At present there are virtually no hard rules for defining geographical boundaries or adjusting values for a summation of monetized environmental impacts. We, however, stress that any rigorous external cost assessment should, for instance in a separate calculation, take account of impacts occurring beyond country borders.
Acknowledgment
A support for manuscript preparation from PRVOUK-P02 programme of Charles University is gratefully acknowledged.
Author statement
Research funding: The manuscript preparation was supproted by PRVOUK-P02 programme of Charles University. Conflict of interest: Authors state no conflict of interest. Informed consent: Informed consent is not applicable. Ethical approval: The conducted research is not related to either human or animals use.
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©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Environmental challenges in Central and Eastern Europe
- Mini Reviews
- The CEECHE: a practical approach for reducing exposures and disease outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe
- Perinatal health in the Danube region – new birth cohort justified
- Building multi-country collaboration on watershed management: lessons on linking environment and public health from the Western Balkans
- An open-sourced statistical application for identifying complex toxicological interactions of environmental pollutants
- Air exchange rates and alternative vapor entry pathways to inform vapor intrusion exposure risk assessments
- Review Articles
- Sustainable exposure prevention through innovative detection and remediation technologies from the NIEHS Superfund Research Program
- Future of environmental research in the age of epigenomics and exposomics
- Linking childhood allergic asthma phenotypes with endotype through integrated systems biology: current evidence and research needs
- Impact of nutrition on pollutant toxicity: an update with new insights into epigenetic regulation
- Environmental PAH exposure and male idiopathic infertility: a review on early life exposures and adult diagnosis
- The association of peripubertal serum concentrations of organochlorine chemicals and blood lead with growth and pubertal development in a longitudinal cohort of boys: a review of published results from the Russian Children’s Study
- Epigenomic reprogramming in inorganic arsenic-mediated gene expression patterns during carcinogenesis
- Emerging roles of xenobiotic detoxification enzymes in metabolic diseases
- Recent advances on iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles as sorbents of organic pollutants in water and wastewater treatment
- Review of heavy metal accumulation on aquatic environment in Northern East Mediterrenean Sea part I: some essential metals
- Original Articles
- Sensemaking, stakeholder discord, and long-term risk communication at a US Superfund site
- Valuing environmental health for informed policy-making
- How serious are health impacts in one of the most polluted regions of Central Europe?
- The results of interconnection of the evidence of professional exposure to genotoxic factors (regex) and cancer registry in the Czech Republic
- The impact of selected environmental, behavioral and psychosocial factors on schoolchildren’s somatic and mental health
- Markers of lipid oxidative damage among office workers exposed intermittently to air pollutants including nanoTiO2 particles
- Determinants of ETS exposure in a sample of Slovak pregnant women
- Respiratory toxicity of Fe3O4 nanoparticles: experimental study
- Exposure of children to phthalates and the impact of consumer practices in Slovakia
- Metal contamination in environmental media in residential areas around Romanian mining sites
