Accounting for Health Risk Inequality in Regulatory Impact Analysis: Barriers and Opportunities

There has been increasing interest in accounting for inequality in health risks and benefits within regulatory impact analyses, both given more general interest in the distributions of benefits and growing concerns about inequity (defined as those inequalities deemed unjust or unfair) and environmental injustice (in this context, those health risk inequalities that are correlated with race/ethnicity and certain other sociodemographic factors). Although there has been growing literature on this topic, there has been limited progress in practice, and the lack of quantification limits consideration of inequality in the policy process. Controversy remains regarding the best approaches to formally incorporate inequality, when these approaches should be used, and even whether it makes sense to quantify inequality in this context. The objective of this article is to review the literature on approaches for incorporating estimates of, and concerns for, inequality into regulatory impact analyses, especially those where environmental justice considerations are relevant, and consider the interpretation of these approaches and the implications for decision making. Using the case example of the Transportation and Climate Initiative, a collaboration among Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector, multiple strategies are described that could be used to shed light on health risk inequality and inequity, consider them in pending policy decisions, and evaluate their implications for the policy or instrument choice. Given appropriate contextualization and acknowledgment of the multidimensionality of equity, quantitative inequality indicators can provide meaningful insight about both inequality and inequity in health risks.