BEST-COST is a 4-year EU-funded research project aiming to improve methodologies for understanding the socioeconomic cost of environmental stressors, with a focus on air and noise pollution.

The BEST-COST R package, healthiar, is now publicly available for researchers to use in their own work assessing health impact assessments and environmental stressors. healthiar is a calculation tool for quantifying and monetising the burden of disease attributable to different environmental exposures. It combines three dimensions – health, monetisation, and social aspects – to present a fuller understanding of the socioeconomic costs resulting from pollution. As a flexible programming resource, healthiar can be used to build a more solid basis for evidence-based policy making. You can access healthiar on both GitHub and CRAN.

BEST-COST has developed a new framework to assess socioeconomic inequalities in the health burden of air and traffic-related noise pollution to help policymakers access reliable and evidence-based information from researchers. To explain this, our new factsheet explores how air and noise pollution affect people’s health in different ways across Europe, zooming in on the BEST-COST case study countries. It also shares tools for policymakers and researchers, so together we can mitigate the burdens from pollution and improve people’s wellbeing across Europe.

Researchers from BEST-COST co-organised the first-ever European Public Health Economics Conference. The conference underlined that health systems must become more resilient to absorb and respond to climate pressures, while governments steer adaptation measures to prevent worsening consequences on our health. Economic evaluation methods can help us to better understand the cost and value of different public health interventions, and therefore identify the most effective ones to reduce the overall burden of disease.

The third and final of the BEST-COST stakeholder consensus meetings took place on 3 October, with a focus on BEST-COST’s work in developing methodologies to calculate cost monetisation in relation to environmental stressors. During the meeting, BEST-COST partners presented their work on developing a cost monetisation framework, for feedback from expert stakeholders. The meeting outcomes will feed into finalising the cost monetisation framework.

Brecht Devleesschauwer, BEST-COST coordinator, presented the project and how public health monitoring tools can be used to advocate for policy action at the EuroHealthNet Annual Seminar on Climate Change and Health. Through monitoring, we can produce neutral and objective data to highlight impact and solutions, and to hold governments accountable. He also emphasised that it is not only about understanding health indicators, but also about translating health impacts into economic terms, making the findings more relevant and compelling for policymakers.

On 22 October, leading researchers, policy experts, and practitioners gathered for the METEOR Workshop on Economic Valuation to explore how methods for valuing health-related costs of environmental stressors can strengthen European and local decision-making. The workshop brought together participants to exchange insights on how scientific evidence can be translated into policy and economic assessments that better capture the true costs of environmental stressors. BEST-COST presented its work on incorporating morbidity in health monetisation, exploring different methods and presenting updates on BEST-COST’s Willingness to Pay survey.

The second edition of the METEOR newsletter contains the latest news from the METEOR research cluster, including its thematic workshop held in the autumn. It also updates you on each project's research, policy, and communication activities: from scientific publications, to policy briefs, to stakeholder workshops – the projects have been busy addressing different environmental stressors and their health impacts.

The METEOR Cluster, which includes BEST-COST, met online and in person in October to review progress across its projects and identify synergies in research and policy engagement. METEOR brings together five Horizon Europe projects researching the health impacts of environmental stressors – including air and noise pollution, as well as chemicals – and their related socioeconomic costs.

BEST-COST researchers presented their ongoing work on the NO₂-COPD exposure response function through posters at several conferences this year, including the European Respiratory Society Congress and the Planetary Health Annual Meeting (PHAM). The posters showcased a systematic review and quantitative synthesis of long-term ambient nitrogen dioxide exposure and its link to COPD – one of the four risk-outcome pairs studied within BEST-COST. Conference attendees expressed strong interest in the methods employed by BEST-COST and showed growing attention to the intersections of pollution and planetary health. The events also highlighted a sense of community and collective momentum in developing tools and approaches to drive systemic change.

 BEST-COST is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under Grant Agreement No.101095408.