Land-use, climate change and the emergence of infectious diseases: A synthesis

William Brock and Anastasios Xepapadeas

No 2409, DEOS Working Papers from Athens University of Economics and Business

Abstract: Scientific evidence suggests that anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such as land-use changes and climate change, promote the emergence of infectious diseases (IDs) in humans. We provide a synthesis which captures interactions between the economy and the natural world and links climate, land-use and IDs. We develop a two-region integrated epidemic-economic model which unifies short-run disease containment policies with long-run policies which could control the drivers and the severity of IDs. We structure our paper by linking susceptible-infected-susceptible and susceptible-infected-recovered models with an economic model which includes land-use choices for agriculture, climate change and accumulation of knowledge that supports land-augmenting technical change. The ID contact number depends on short-run policies (e.g., lockdowns, vaccination), and long-run policies affecting land-use, the natural world and climate change. Climate change and land-use change have an additional cost in terms of IDs since they might increase the contact number in the long-run. We derive optimal short-run containment controls for a Nash equilibrium between regions, and long-run controls for climate policy, land-use, and knowledge at an open loop Nash equilibrium and the social optimum and unify the short- and long-run controls. We explore the impact of ambiguity aversion and model misspecification in the unified model and provide simulations which support the theoretical model.

Keywords: infectious diseases; SIS and SIR models; natural world; climate change; land-use; containment; Nash equilibrium; OLNE; social optimum; land-augmenting technical change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 I18 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-gth and nep-res
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aue:wpaper:2409

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