Online Program

Oral

Environmental health funding has taken a major hit over the past five years. The field faces diminishing financial resources, in addition to fewer experienced workers, increasing pressure from traditional environmental health issues, and emerging nontraditional issues. Funding has never been so critically important, yet the economic climate and budget cuts are threatening to stymie or even reverse environmental health programmatic progress at federal, state, and local levels. The National Environmental Health Partnership Council (NEHPC)—a group of stakeholders funded by CDC’s NCEH/ATSDR to help expand and sustain awareness, education, policies, and practices related to environmental health—recognized the critical need for the field to be able to articulate its value. The NEHPC and its member organizations completed a comprehensive literature review to analyze the existing economic evidence and found that the benefits of environmental health programming and policy often outweigh their costs but little ROI data exists; that more national-level data demonstrating economic value is needed outside of regulatory work; and that gaps exist in the economic literature. Additionally, this session will highlight the significant cost-benefits in children’s health to preventing asthma, childhood obesity, lead poisoning, and learning disabilities, and will discuss the robust study that is underway and hoping to demonstrate that green housing renovations will reduce asthma-related health care utilization of resident children with asthma.

Session Objectives: Demonstrate an understanding of the current body of knowledge about the cost-benefit and return on investment of environmental health. Identify the gaps that exist in the literature evaluating the economic value of environmental health. Describe the cost benefits of placing children’s needs in the center of public health implementation and policy initiatives. Discuss the flaws that exist in how federal agencies conduct cost-benefit analyses for children. Discuss the process of analyzing the cost-benefits of housing improvements on health.