Green light for malaria vaccine for Africa

Tania Rabesandratana in SciDev.net: The first malaria vaccine has received the green light from European regulators today, opening the door for vaccination campaigns for infants in Africa. This a big leap forward for the RTS,S vaccine after decades of research. Also known under the commercial name Mosquirix, the vaccine is intended to protect children aged six weeks to 17 months against the mosquito-transmitted Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes malaria.

“RTS,S is an imperfect vaccine, providing only partial protection against clinical malaria,” says Brian Greenwood, a clinical tropical medicine researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, today’s approval is an “important landmark” that can help control malaria where other methods, such as using bed nets impregnated with insecticides, are not effective enough, Greenwood adds.

According to the World Health Organization, 562,000 people died from malaria in Africa in 2013, of whom 82 per cent were children under five.

The main evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective comes from a large clinical trial conducted in seven African countries, the European Medicines Agency said in a statement. According to this trial, Mosquirix provides “modest protection”, which decreases after one year, but despite this “limited efficacy”, its benefits outweigh the risks, the agency says....

USAID photo of Angolan children with bednets for malaria protection

Weighing costs and benefits--a Carbon Based original

In deciding whether to undertake large projects, most managers and policymakers begin with a cost-benefit analysis, or CBA.  The advantage of CBA is its comparative simplicity. The choice with the largest net gains is the one we should select. This method shows a way forward using straightforward assumptions.

Unfortunately, when the first step in an important assessment is a CBA, policymakers have already closed off major alternatives, usually the ones that involve non-economic values.  And in a changing climate, a naive use of CBA creates a strong bias against, for example, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. 

Most economic theory struggles to explicitly addressing environmental goods and ills, which are not so readily translated into costs.  In fact, global warming is a market failure, perhaps the most significant market failure of all.

Most CBA users assume that the environment will remain stable over the life of the endeavor.  Yet climate change jeopardizes that stability. When farm productivity dropped because of environmental degradation during the Dust Bowl, recovery took decades.  A growing frequency of coastal property being inundated and disrupted by storm surges can dramatically alter the environmental picture --and therefore the economic outlook. But economists rarely call attention to these issues.

Environmental goods and ecosystem services are not readily quantified, and thus easy to take for granted in a business-dominated world. Insurance is one business mechanism that quantifies natural disaster costs to some degree, but the point of view is pretty limited and stylized. It's a distorted lens for getting the whole picture of climate change.

Risk is a blind spot for CBA, too. Even a mainstream economist such as Martin Weitzman notes that low probability but high impact scenarios tend to disappear from conventional CBA.  The destruction from Hurricane Sandy is a recent instance. Everyone knew that a hurricane hitting New Jersey and New York had a serious potential for tremendous losses. But long decades between storms lulled everyone, economists included, into postponing decisive action.  This is true even though the Bloomberg administration has actually done more than nearly any other American city. Sandy has shown how inadequate this effort was.

A more fundamental drawback is philosophical.  Cost-benefit analysis embodies norms that persistently steer us toward short-term ventures, consumption, and individualist standards -- the prevailing ideology of our era. The utilitarian bias of economists lead to scant regard to matters of morality, rights and justice. Personal relationships count for little, as does art, and even nature itself except where some natural feature has an obvious dollar equivalent.

In utilitarian style, CBA reduces values to mere preferences, which have to compete with a long list of stakeholder desires.  This group wants to preserve thriving wetlands, but other people want to buy houses that are "close to the land," and the alternatives compete in a CBA. If preserving ecosystem services imposes severe costs in the short term, then standard-issue property development will rule the day. It's left to environmentalists to object that, say, losing wetlands or species will result in overwhelming damage to property in a few years, or decades.

This raises another hitch for cost benefit analysis. CBA pays little attention to how the costs and benefits are distributed through time. By favoring the present generation, it allows those of us alive now to pass our knottiest difficulties on to our children and grandchildren. As I noted in an earlier post about the discount rate, economic theory struggles with how to coherently weigh the standing of later generations. Some economists openly declare that the present goods outweigh future utility -- which is why the future assigned a lower worth, using a discount rate. This may work well enough for financial investments, but it starts falling apart when ethics are involved.  And in climate change, ethics should be at the heart of the matter.

Dispensing with CBA altogether isn't possible, and it would be irresponsible to neglect the balance of costs and benefits of competing climate mitigation efforts. But when it comes to climate change, we have to be aware of the tool's limitations.

The cost of disaster: Putting a price tag on climate change

Ann Goodman in Green Biz: In this era of apparently mounting natural disasters worldwide—many, such as floods from hurricanes, likely related to changing weather patterns linked to climate change—one might ask: How much do such disasters cost? How are the costs calculated?

In fact, someone has asked—analyzing not just the cost of the event itself, but the larger economic costs linked to build-up and often long recovery.

“The public focus [of a disaster] is on the moment, the trauma of the extreme event,” says John Mutter, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, as well as International Public Affairs, at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “The economic loss focuses on that moment, too—what was actually lost at the time.”

However, that loss to the economy—the chain of production, consumption and everything that goes into it—doesn’t happen in a moment, but actually begins after, he says, “with losses that go beyond the value of the built structures trashed at the time, beyond the capital asset loss, to a deeper economic loss that happens over time.”

The theory of calculating disaster costs is just developing, as natural disasters become more prevalent; business can incorporate principles from a three-pronged process into new strategic thinking on what disaster is and how it might affect particular sectors or individual companies. In fact, a climate-related—or other--disaster is a process with three key parts: build-up, event and recovery....

Hurricane damage from Katrina to a mobile home in Florida, shot by FEMA

Groundbreaking study ties climate to state economies

Sandia News Releases: A climate-change study at Sandia National Laboratories that models the near-term effects of declining rainfall in each of the 48 U.S. continental states makes clear the economic toll that could occur unless an appropriate amount of initial investment — a kind of upfront insurance payment — is made to forestall much larger economic problems down the road.

Why tie climate change to economics? “Absent any idea of costs, the need to address climate change seems remote and has a diluted sense of urgency,” study lead George Backus said.

The Sandia study uses probability techniques familiar to insurance companies. Tables place dollar estimates on the effects of climate change in the absence of mitigation or other policy initiatives over the 2010-2050 time period.

…“On the one hand, there’s a lot of uncertainty in quantifying climate change,” said Backus. “Everyone sees that. It’s this uncertainty that presents the greatest difficulty for policy makers. If society knew how change would exactly unfold, we could undertake adaptation and mitigation responses.” Yet, Backus and his team wrote in the introduction to their paper, in other areas of interest to society, “despite uncertainty about the future, cost-benefit analyses are conducted on a daily basis as aids for policymakers on issues of critical importance to the nation such as health care, social security and defense.”

…California, the Pacific Northwest and Colorado, for example, are the only states in the study that seem to benefit overall from the variation in precipitation that climate change might engender. That is because population would leave those states whose economy is hit hardest by reduced water availability, moving into and stimulating the economies of the less-affected states.

While the uncertainty in climate change predictions are often given as a reason by those skeptical of climate change to ignore the problem because of the wide range of model results, the study’s authors take a point of view more common to insurance companies. In insurance, Backus said, greater uncertainty means greater risk. In such cases, insurance companies merely reflect the higher risk in a higher insurance premium….

Columbia River in Hanford Reach National Monument, Washington, shot by the Fish and Wildlife Service

Look beyond "cost-benefit" analysis in adaptation

IRIN: You can put a price tag on the cost of building a dyke to protect people from sea-level rise brought on by climate change, but not on how they will benefit from it, say the co-authors of a new paper calling on countries not to restrict themselves to cost-benefit analysis.

Co-authors Rachel Berger, a climate change policy advisor to Practical Action, an international development charity, and Muyeye Chambwera, a researcher at the UK-based International Institute for Environment Development, said they were prompted to write their paper because countries were in danger of focusing exclusively on the cost-benefit analysis approach.

…"Most climate change adaptation cost reports produced recently have used the cost-benefit analysis tool," Chambwera noted. What set their alarm bells ringing was the agenda of a recent workshop organized by the Nairobi Work Programme (NWP) on how to use cost-benefit methods for adaptation planning at country and community levels.

…"The problem is that in our society the language with the most weight is that of money, so there will always be pressure to reduce the complexity of decision-making to tallying up the costs and benefits in some oversimplified currency metric."

Roberts, who has produced key research on the role of foreign aid in addressing climate justice issues, commented: "The key to me is that for each adaptation action, or non-action, different people reap the benefits from those who bear the costs. For this reason, cost-benefit analysis is indeed nearly useless at the local or even national level."…

Shot of a folding ruler by Isabelle Grosjean ZA, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License