Conference Agenda

Feedback loops between income dynamics and disease prevalence affect livelihoods for many communities around the world by reinforcing conditions that can foster poverty traps. We develop a coupled natural-human system model of a local economy integrated with ecological and disease dynamics, which we use to investigate the direct and ancillary consequences of targeted policy interventions in a rural, developing-country setting where household livelihoods are deeply linked to health and the environment. Our model characterizes relationships between labor allocation, ecological sustainability, and disease transmission that are common across a wide range of settings. Our results demonstrate that targeted policy interventions can produce both intuitive and counterintuitive consequences. Productivity-enhancing interventions can produce economic, ecological, and public health benefits, while interventions that target ecological objectives may inadvertently prop up conditions that underlie disease-based poverty traps. We also consider how market structure may exacerbate or mitigate the trade-offs resulting from stand-alone and concurrently implemented policy interventions.