Holistic approaches for risk-benefit assessment

Moving towards holistic approaches that assess trade-offs among health, sustainability, and economics is imperative to minimize emergent risks and drivers of environmental degradation associated with food systems. Health risk-benefit assessments provide informative outputs to support decision-making within the public health domain. However, integrating indicators from different dimensions requires tailoring current risk-benefit methods. In this context, multicriteria decision analysis methodologies can be relevant to account for different factors and weighing trade-offs of real-life scenarios of changes in food systems. In addition, further research building on initiatives attempting to integrate frameworks within health (e.g., risk analysis) and environment (e.g., Life-Cycle Assessment and linear programming) or health and economics (e.g., cost-benefit and cost of illness), is needed to establish a holistic risk-benefit assessment framework. This presentation will introduce current efforts in the development of holistic assessment methods that evaluate impacts beyond the health risk and benefits perspective. In addition, the presentation will highlight the potential gains of such methods in policymaking.