Science
20 November 2015 vol 350, issue 6263, pages 885-1000
http://www.sciencemag.org/current.dtl

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Feature
What does a disease deserve?
Jocelyn Kaiser
Since the early 1990s, Congress and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have agreed to dedicate roughly 10% of the NIH budget to fighting HIV/AIDS. Now, however, that special arrangement is under fire. Health policy experts, lawmakers, and even NIH officials have wondered why, 2 decades after AIDS death rates began dropping dramatically in the United States, the disease still gets a lion’s share of NIH resources, or $3 billion this year. As questions have arisen about how HIV/AIDS research funds are spent, NIH has also resolved to refocus AIDS money on ending the epidemic. Some voice a broader critique: that NIH’s spending on a disease often doesn’t align with how much suffering it causes. They note that diseases imposing a relatively small burden on U.S. society, such as AIDS, can get a larger share of NIH funding than those that cause greater harm, such as heart disease. Recently, while responding to pointed questions from a member of Congress about the issue, NIH Director Francis Collins said the agency is ready to abandon the 10% set-aside. And next month officials are expected to release an agency-wide strategic plan that they say will address how disease burden should influence the allocation of research dollars.

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Policy Forum
Energy and Environment
Transport: A roadblock to climate change mitigation?
Felix Creutzig1,2,*, Patrick Jochem3, Oreane Y. Edelenbosch4, Linus Mattauch1,2, Detlef P. van Vuuren4,5, David McCollum6, Jan Minx1,7
Author Affiliations
1Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), 10829 Berlin, Germany.
2Technical University Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany.
3Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany.
4PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 3720AH Bilthoven, Netherlands.
5Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Geosciences, Utrecht University, 3584CS Utrecht, Netherlands.
6International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), 2361 Laxenburg, Austria.
7Hertie School of Governance, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
Summary
Global emissions scenarios studies, such as those informing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (AR5), highlight the importance of the transport sector for climate change mitigation—along with the difficulties of achieving deep reductions therein (1) [supplementary materials (SM)]. Transport is responsible for about 23% of total energy-related CO2 emissions worldwide (2). The sector is growing more rapidly than most others, with emissions projected to double by 2050. Global scenario studies, specifically those produced by integrated assessment models (IAMs), communicate aggregate mitigation potentials by sectors in IPCC reports. Yet recent evidence indicates that emissions may be reduced further than these global scenario studies suggest—if policy-makers use the full suite of policies at their disposal.