Imagine trying to put a price tag on how much smog or city noise actually costs a society in terms of healthcare and lost work. This work creates a standardized calculator to turn health damage into money values. It helps leaders see exactly where pollution hits the hardest and how much it costs the economy.
Policymakers and businesses struggle to quantify the actual financial loss caused by air and noise pollution. This makes it difficult to justify investments in pollution reduction or accurately price environmental health risks.
A documented R package and computational infrastructure for quantifying and monetizing the burden of disease (DALYs) associated with environmental stressors.
If you are an insurance provider dealing with rising claims in polluted urban areas — this project developed a monetization tool that quantifies the health burden of air and noise pollution. This allows for more accurate risk pricing based on environmental stressors.
If you are a consultancy dealing with city zoning and noise mitigation — this project developed an R package that estimates the socio-economic cost of environmental stressors. You can now provide clients with evidence-based financial justifications for green infrastructure.
If you are a city manager dealing with health inequalities across different neighborhoods — this project developed a method to measure the unequal distribution of pollution impacts. This helps in allocating budgets to the areas with the highest economic burden of disease.
Based on available project data, the tools are being developed as open-access code, meaning they are intended to be freely available.
The project has developed a computational infrastructure and an R package currently being tested in 5 EU countries, indicating it is moving toward scalable use.
The project explicitly aims to produce open-access tools and code, suggesting a non-proprietary licensing model for the resulting methodologies.
It provides a consensus-driven method for policy impact assessments, helping companies and regulators align with the European Green Deal's Zero-Pollution Action Plan.
The project period runs from 2023-01-01 to 2026-12-31, with current work focused on finalizing methodologies and piloting case studies.
The consortium is heavily weighted toward research and academia, consisting of 17 partners from 11 countries. With 7 universities and 9 research organizations, and 0% industry representation, the project is driven by scientific validation rather than commercial product development. However, the inclusion of world-class expertise from the Global Burden of Disease study and support from the WHO and EEA ensures high regulatory and scientific credibility.
Contact SCIENSANO in Belgium for technical details on the R package.
Contact us to find out how to integrate these open-access pollution cost tools into your ESG reporting.
