Pillar 4 – Promoting Nature Capital

Pillar 4
Promoting Nature Capital

SGFIN’s Pillar 4 focuses on evaluating the environmental and social impacts of nature-based projects. It develops frameworks to assess project integrity, ecosystem services and community outcomes, helping investors identify high-quality initiatives. By integrating climate, biodiversity and social metrics, this work guides capital toward projects that deliver lasting sustainability and resilience.

SGFIN research on natural capital investigates how it can be valued, protected and integrated into financial and policy decision-making. It advances robust evidence on biodiversity, ecosystem services and market-based instruments, while exploring incentives, disclosure frameworks and governance mechanisms that align economic activity with long-term environmental sustainability, risk management and climate resilience.

Temperature & Negative Health Outcomes

Journal Publication

Agarwal, S., Yu, Q,. Shi, L., Wei, G., & Zhu, H. (2021). Impact of temperature on morbidity: New evidence from China. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 109(102495), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2021.102495

In this study, we investigate how temperature impacts hospitalization rates in China. Utilizing medical data from two major public insurance programs across 47 cities and 28 provinces over three years, we found that when the average temperature exceeds 27°C, there is a 7.3% increase in hospital admissions and a 2% increase in hospitalizations over the subsequent weeks compared to normal temperature days. This effect is more pronounced than what has been observed in developed countries. We also calculated the financial impact of these temperature-related hospitalizations. Each additional hot day in China results in about 2 billion yuan (roughly 0.3 billion US dollars) in increased medical expenses, with 1.9 billion yuan (about 0.29 billion US dollars) covered by the public insurance system and 0.2 billion yuan (approximately 0.01 billion US dollars) paid by insured individuals. In simple terms, our study shows that hot weather significantly increases hospitalizations and healthcare costs in China, with most of the cost burden placed on the public insurance system.