Review of a Report Providing Health Impact Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Eskom activities

The review concludes that the Eskom report significantly underestimates the health impacts and economic benefits of pollution abatement due to flawed modelling, incorrect response function selection, and an inappropriately high discount rate. The reviewers estimate that the benefits of action would exceed costs by a factor of 5 or more, which would reverse the original conclusions of the Eskom CBA.

• The Eskom report's pollutant modelling is inadequate because it relies on short-range modelling (up to 66 km), which fails to capture a major part of the impacts from high-stack sources like coal-fired power plants, particularly secondary pollutants.
• The process for selecting response functions in the Eskom report is flawed, leading to an underestimation of impacts; using the pollutant with the strongest association with the effect would more than double the estimated impact.
• The Eskom report uses an interval-based approach to link pollutant concentrations with response functions, which the reviewers identify as non-conservative and likely to underestimate impacts by up to 50%.
• The use of an 8.5% discount rate in the Eskom CBA is significantly higher than standard socio-economic assessments in other regions, which biases the results toward underestimating economic damage and undermines the rights of future citizens.
• The Eskom analysis is limited to adult mortality, ignoring morbidity and childhood mortality, which likely underestimates total health costs by approximately 10% to 20%.
• The reviewers calculate that the combined biases in the Eskom report lead to an underestimation of benefits by at least a factor of 5, which would reverse the original CBA conclusions and show that benefits exceed costs for all scenarios.
• The Eskom report lacks transparency, failing to provide key data such as baseline emission levels, changes in emissions per plant over time, and attributable deaths by scenario.

APA

Holland, M., & Spadaro, J. (2019). Review of a Report Providing Health Impact Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Eskom activities. Centre for Environmental Rights. https://cer.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Annexure-4.pdf?x21779

Chicago

Holland, Michael, and Joseph Spadaro. Review of a Report Providing Health Impact Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Eskom activities. Centre for Environmental Rights, 2019. https://cer.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Annexure-4.pdf?x21779.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Holland |first1=Michael |last2=Spadaro |first2=Joseph |title=Review of a Report Providing Health Impact Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Eskom activities |publisher=Centre for Environmental Rights |date=14 February 2019 |url=https://cer.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Annexure-4.pdf?x21779 |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{holland2019review, author = {Holland, Michael and Spadaro, Joseph}, title = {{Review of a Report Providing Health Impact Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Eskom activities}}, institution = {Centre for Environmental Rights}, year = {2019}, month = feb, url = {https://cer.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Annexure-4.pdf?x21779}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }