Driving Innovation in Health Cost Assessment Across Europe

As outcomes of 3 years of intense EU collaborative research, VALESOR project is delivering concrete results that will shape how Europe assesses the economic impacts of pollution on health. These outcomes are expected to provide policymakers with lasting tools that support the EU’s zero pollution goals and ensure future environmental policies generate measurable public health benefits.

A central area within the VALESOR project has assessed the health burden linked to chemical pollution exposure and demonstrating how improved regulation can yield significant social and economic gains. The importance of VALESOR’s contributions lies in harmonising valuation methods that support EU-wide zero pollution ambitions and public health strategies.

Building collaborative sessions held in different stakeholder workshops and policy sessions held in renowned international conferences like EAERE, SBCA and EPHEC, VALESOR developed an innovative on-line tool building on most recent research. The VALESOR tool External link. is designed to assess health effects and the corresponding economic damage of planned variations in chemical stressors (CHEM module) and air pollution (AIR module). The tool operates with emission reduction scenarios and for each scenario provides users with a set of outputs such as the effects on health (decreased mortality, morbidity) and the expected benefits associated to these effects. The tool allows users to easily test several valuation methods, adjust values of key parameters and directly see changes in the results. VALESOR’s potential users are policymakers, scientists, academia, NGOs – the tool is meant to support their research and decision-making procedures by providing scientific basis for health impact assessments and Cost-Benefit analyses.

A guidance document addressed at stakeholders links the methods developed in the VALESOR project with the VALESOR tools. It provides introductory information on the role and the methods of economic valuation of health impacts from atmospheric pollution and chemical substances and then focusses on guidelines for the quantification and economic valuation of health effects caused by environmental stressors. In this it takes a specific view on the approaches developed and decision made in the development of the VALESOR tool. The guidelines developed are relevant both for Environmental Burden of Disease (EBD), assessing the health burden (costs) for given pollution exposure levels, and Health Impact Analysis (HIA), quantifying the changes in health damage. Both are supported by VALESOR tools. Guidance is adapted, where relevant, to the classical air pollutants on the one hand, and chemical substances on the other hand. Guidelines are also specific to the two valuation approaches relying on the estimation of cases of health impacts (mortality and morbidity) as well as approaches relying on the estimation of quality-adjusted life years (QALY). This more method-oriented guidance report is complemented by tool user guidance explaining the users which data to provide and choices to make in the tools in which order.

Project’s main development steps are summarized in VALESOR brochure.