Land-use, climate change and the emergence of infectious diseases: A synthesis

Scientific evidence suggests that anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such as land-use changes and climate change, promote the emergence of infectious diseases (IDs) in humans. We provide a synthesis which captures interactions between the economy and the natural world and links climate, land-use and IDs. We develop a two-region integrated epidemic-economic model which unifies short-run disease containment policies with long-run policies which could control the drivers and the severity of IDs. We structure our paper by linking susceptible-infected-susceptible and susceptible-infected-recovered models with an economic model which includes land-use choices for agriculture, climate change and accumulation of knowledge that supports land-augmenting technical change. The ID contact number depends on short-run policies (e.g., lockdowns, vaccination), and long-run policies affecting land-use, the natural world and climate change. Climate change and land-use change have an additional cost in terms of IDs since they might increase the contact number in the long-run. We derive optimal short-run containment controls for a Nash equilibrium between regions, and long-run controls for climate policy, land-use, and knowledge at an open loop Nash equilibrium and the social optimum and unify the short- and long-run controls. We explore the impact of ambiguity aversion and model misspecification in the unified model and provide simulations which support the theoretical model.