10.2 Introduction

Economic evaluation is a set of methodologies that help assess the efficiency of an intervention. Efficiency is a criterion that relates the intervention’s costs with its results to support decision-making in systems that are not regulated by the market, such as the healthcare sector. The rationale is to choose interventions that offer the best results at the lowest cost. By considering efficiency as a resource allocation criterion the opportunity cost of investments is minimized. Recently, the evaluation field has seen a growing interest in economic evaluation methods for estimating return on investment and for assigning a monetary value to nature.

Economic evaluation is a field of applied research that aims at guiding decision-making. Entire books have been dedicated to economic evaluations, as it is a specialized field. There is a long history of methods development and critiques of how economic evaluation introduces biases or leads to undesirable choices. This chapter offers an overview of mainstream economic evaluation approaches. It should help evaluators understand their specificities, differences, strengths and risks. It provides an avenue for evaluators to support informed decision-making while integrating planetary health lenses and avoiding identified gaps.