Mission
What is
BEST-COST?
BEST-COST is a 4-year EU-funded research project which brings together a consortium of 17 partners from Europe and the USA, and is led by Sciensano, the Belgian institute for health.
BEST-COST sets out to improve methodologies for understanding the socioeconomic cost of environmental stressors, focusing on air and noise pollution.
What is our
mission?
The expected results from BEST-COST will contribute to improved policies and practices that reduce the burden of disease, and to creating living and working environments that are more health-promoting, equitable and sustainable across the whole of Europe.
What does
BEST-COST do?
BEST-COST is developing a novel methodological framework to quantify the burden and cost, as well as the social and health inequalities, caused by air and noise pollution.
This framework will enable researchers and policymakers to adopt a harmonised approach in understanding the health costs of pollution. With this, we can improve economic and health modelling in policy impact assessments.
Objectives
BEST-COST will enable us all to better understand:
The health impacts of air and noise pollution
The inequalities in how these impacts are distributed, affecting some more than others
The cost of these health impacts on our societies
Results
BEST-COST will achieve these objectives by delivering:
• An improved and consensual burden of disease framework for estimating the health impact of environmental stressors;
• A novel and harmonised methodology for monetising and discounting health loss estimates in burden of disease;
• A coherent methodological framework for assessing the extent of social inequalities caused by the cost of environmental stressors;
• Open access code for consensus methodologies to be made available to other researchers and expand existing tools;
• Guidance to test and implement the developed methodologies in five European countries;
• Knowledge and methodology transferability to other stressors and countries and ensure that they are useful, usable and used.
Project Timeline
January
Kick-off of project
March
Consensus meeting on methodological protocol for quantifying the environmental burden of disease
June
Establishment of harmonised methodology to understand the burden of disease
Publication of methodological protocol for quantifying the environmental burden of disease
Establishment of EU index of multiple deprivation to understand the impact of air and noise pollution on social inequalities
September
Trialling of BEST-COST research methodologies in 5 European countries
Consensus meeting on methodological protocol for integrating social inequalities in environmental impact assessments
December
Publication of methodological protocol for integrating social inequalities in environmental impact assessments
September
Consensus meeting on methodological protocol for monetisation and discounting
November
BEST-COST Hackathon to explore additional stressors and their impact on health costs
December
Establishment of guidance on transferability of research methods to other environmental stressors and publication of methodological protocol for monetisation and discounting
April
Policy roundtable on BEST-COST recommendations and action framework
September
Establishment of transferability of research methods to other countries
Three capacity-building workshops to support policymakers to integrate the BEST-COST framework into their activities
November
Final BEST-COST conference
December
Translation of R scripts into Python for wider use in the quantification and monetization of the burdens of key environmental stressors
Work Packages
Work Package 1
Burden of disease methodology for outdoor air pollution and noise
Work Package 2
Cost/monetisation methodology
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Work Package 3
Social inequalities methodology
–
Work Package 4
Programming resources
–
Work Package 5
Case studies
–
Work Package 6
Transferability of methodological framework
Work Package 7
Project coordination and management
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Work Package 8
Data management and ethical requirements
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Work Package 9
Communication, dissemination, exploitation, stakeholder engagement
