Our study demonstrates that forest conservation can serve as a public health investment, enhancing social welfare by mitigating illness and reducing associated healthcare expenditures.
In this study, we estimate the marginal effects of increasing forest cover on dengue prevalence in Costa Rica using econometric models to relate hospital admission records to forest cover maps from 2001 and 2011. We find that increasing the percentage of forest cover significantly decreases both the number of hospital admissions for dengue and the probability of an outbreak. Using the same models, we predict that if forest cover had been increased by three percentage points during 10 years (0.29% per year), 29 dengue hospital admissions per year might have been avoided (around 1.4% of cases in the country, depending on the year). This represents average savings between USD 7230 and 82,207 per year, depending on the severity of the impact on individuals with dengue. Our study demonstrates that forest conservation can serve as a public health investment, enhancing social welfare by mitigating illness and reducing associated healthcare expenditures. Our results must be interpreted with caution, however, as the characteristics of our data prevent us from confirming that the estimated negative effects of forest cover on dengue represents a causal impact.
