Epidemics and climate change: Disease containment or climate mitigation?

We analyze the mutual relation between infectious diseases, climate change and economic capability, focusing on the role of individual decisions and public measures. Climate change favors the spread of novel communicable diseases which determine the size of the healthy workforce; healthy workers are the input in the economic production process which generate polluting emissions; polluting emissions are the main driver of carbon concentration ultimately driving climate change. Individuals’ decisions to comply with social distancing regulations as well as income taxation to finance disease treatment and emissions abatement jointly determine epidemiological and compliance dynamics. We show that according to the specific parametrization a broad variety of possible outcomes may arise, such as the coexistence of multiple stable equilibria, path dependency and metastable transitions. We assess the relative desirability of public policies aiming to speed up recovery or to reduce environmental degradation, showing that in a COVID-like disease parametrization it may be convenient to achieve full carbon neutrality to reduce the climate-induced risk of new epidemic outbreaks.