CHDS’ Sarah Skye Yoden and Ankur Pandya coauthored a WHO Bulletin perspective article with Neil Singh Bedi that described how decision science methods paired with fair process can improve the transparency, legitimacy, and accountability of climate-health policy recommendations. The article highlighted two widely used modeling parameters whose selection depends not only on empirical evidence but also on ethical and value-based judgments: discounting and equity weighting.
Although discount rates are often presented as technical assumptions, intergenerational discounting is shaped in part by normative beliefs about how much weight society should place on the welfare of future generations relative to the present. Similarly, equity weights and distributional analyses require explicit judgments about how benefits and harms should be distributed across different groups within the current generation. Together, these parameters embed assumptions about how society values welfare across both time and populations.
The authors argued that because these choices reflect social values rather than purely scientific facts, they should be informed by fair, transparent, and participatory processes. Such processes enable decision-makers, stakeholders, and affected communities to better understand and evaluate the ethical commitments underlying model outputs and policy recommendations. The article concluded that integrating fair process with decision science can help ensure that climate-health analyses reflect not only the best available evidence but also the values and priorities of the communities they are intended to serve.
Yoden is a doctoral student in the Harvard PhD in Health Policy program in the decision science track.
Learn more: Read the publication, Contributions of Decision Science to Ethical Priority-Setting in Climate
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