Estimating environmental health benefits: implications for social decision making

Discusses the measurement and conceptual difficulties of assessing the benefits of environmental improvements in monetary terms, in the context of a study undertaken to evaluate the health‐related benefits of improved air quality in a large, diverse urban population. Describes an interdisciplinary approach methodology to assess health benefits and uses the results from a study based on that approach to illustrate the practical and conceptual difficulties of comprehensively assessing such benefits. Ends with a discussion of the implications of these difficulties for using benefit‐cost analysis in deciding public policy for health‐related environmental improvements, particularly in the case of complex atmospheric changes.