**3.5 The value of information**

In an era of increasingly tight budgets, it is imperative that funders in both the public and private sectors understand the value of investments in different types of information distributed across and within the germane research areas. Climate change research is a case in point; billions of dollars are being spent to improve the knowledge base for future decision-making. A study by the National Research Council [44] called for decision tools to assist in estimating "the value of new information which can help decision makers plan research programs and determine which trends to monitor to best implement a risk management strategy." Identifying the relevant decision-makers measurable priorities is critical, though, because it is their net benefit valuation protocols that produce the VOI metrics with which these calculations can be conducted. The Academy study emphasized that the application of decision theory could provide explicit descriptions of how rigorously to evaluate the appropriate value of perfect and imperfect information, much as done 30 years ago in [45–47].

On the health side of the comparison, VOI estimates need not be calibrated in monetary currency; human lives or other metric can be employed, especially if it can support aggregation across locations. This is one of the major lessons from the "risk to unique and threatened systems" Reason for Concern described in [48], even for the two areas where risks are measured in aggregates. In fact, risks of extreme (weather) events and risks to unique and threatened systems (including human communities) are areas where alternatives to financial currency are preferred.

Assuming access to decision-makers' lists of operative and quantifiable valuation metrics (including confidence in the ability to keep experienced risk below a tolerable maximum), temporal distributions of the value of enacting a re-opening strategy of a locked-down economy relative to a "stay the course" strategy could be available, for example, and the sign and magnitude of valued in differences in lives or jobs or gross domestic product or income inequality or even the likelihood of slowing progress toward an SDG could all be of interest, so, too, would be estimates of distributions of the value of improved (or depreciated) information about driving variables and/or epidemiological-socio-economic specifications.
