Health Co-benefits of Climate Mitigation Policies: Why Is It So Hard to Convince Policy-Makers of Them and What Can Be Done to Change That?

The health co-benefits of mitigation strategies across different regions of the world are compared with the mitigation costs using state-of-the-art modelling and health benefit estimation methods. Global co-benefits exceed mitigation costs for both the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets. At the national/regional level the co-benefits only exceed the mitigation costs of India. In other regions they still make a major contribution to reducing overall costs. Given these findings the chapter examines why co-benefits have played a small role in climate policy. Reasons include interpretations of the value of the health co-benefits, especially premature mortality, not accounting for some important non-health economic co-benefits and the asymmetry between diffuse co-benefits versus concentrated mitigation costs. The chapter offers some ways of addressing these factors to make co-benefits more central in climate policy.