Hidden assets: The economic and health case for climate and clean air action
Publisher
United Nations Environment Programme
Simon Dietz was a co-chair of the report and contributing author
Climate change and air pollution share many of the same sources, yet are almost always assessed separately. This Assessment seeks to correct that. It evaluates 25 proven solutions across energy, industry, transport, agriculture, cooking and waste, and finds that integrated action delivers more than acting on either alone. Every dollar invested returns around 15 dollars, an internal rate of return of 60 per cent, with market returns exceeding costs within ten years. By 2050 the solutions could avoid 144 million premature deaths and hundreds of millions of cases of chronic disease. The chief obstacles are often neither technical nor economic but institutional. The Assessment finds that investment in enabling conditions can bring full implementation forward by up to a decade, worth up to US$10 trillion in savings by 2040.