Developing Methods for Environmental HIA
What is Integrated Environmental HIA?
Health Impact Assessment is about methods and tools for estimating the public health impacts of policies and measures, including how those impacts are distributed across the population.
Environmental HIA is concerned with those aspects which affect public health via the physical environment – policies in transport, energy or agriculture which affect air pollution and consequently affect human health are a case in point.
Environmental HIA is really just one aspect of a full and proper health impact assessment. However, it tends to get special attention, because for many environmental pollutants – and notably for outdoor air pollution – the evidence base is strong enough to support quantitative assessment of health effects, with associated uncertainties. This gives environmental HIA a particular flavour, including a strong role for subject matter experts, compared with HIA generally, sometimes known as social HIA because of its focus on social determinants of health.
For a good description of the relationship between the two, see Hurley and Vohra in the recently published (2010) Textbook of Environment Medicine. And see Briggs (2008) for an overview of Integrated Environmental HIA.
20 years experience of Environmental HIA
The IOM's tradition of research in Environmental HIA Methods started about 20 years ago, as part of the ExternE series of projects of the European Commission DG Research. This series of large European collaborative research projects developed methods for estimating the external costs of activities and policies in electricity production from fossil fuels, and transport.
External costs are those costs attributable to an activity but not included in the price; it is necessary to have evidence-based methods and tools for estimating them, if the principle that "the polluter pays" is to be implemented. Estimation involves linking information on many different aspects of the impact pathway from changes in emissions through to monetary valuation of health effects. IOM helped develop the overall framework and, in particular, led on developing methods for estimating the health impacts of changes in environmental exposures, including exposure to air pollutants.
The ExternE team found that the main external costs of electricity production from fossil fuels, and from transport, came from the public health effects of outdoor air pollution, and how these activities contributed to global warming. Key publications – both methods and results – are on the ExternE website.
What we're doing now
The early ExternE work, linked with IOM's capabilities in epidemiology, toxicology, exposure assessment and multidisciplinary working, has led to several active stream of research at IOM, developing methods for environmental HIA, and especially on estimating the health impacts of changes in population exposures. The underlying aim is so that the development of policies can be better informed by knowledge of their likely consequences for health, whether these are policies at EU or national level, or more local initiatives like changes to road infrastructure or a new waste treatment plant.
Outdoor air pollution has been, and continues to be, a major stream of activity. Work focuses on developing and applying methods (using evidence, data and models) to estimate the public health effects of changes in outdoor air pollution, especially the classical pollutants of particulate matter (PM), ozone, NO2, SO2 and CO. IOM led on development of methods for the HIA of the European Commission’s Clean Air for Europe Programme, and is currently active in extending these methods on several other projects. For more information, visit our page on the HIA of Outdoor Air Pollution.
Wider environmental health impacts: IOM is also strongly involved in developing methods for environmental HIA which encompass a much wider range of environmental factors; and we lead two major collaborative research projects with this purpose. HEIMTSA, funded by the EU, focuses principally on pollutants and adverse health effects; EDPHiS, funded by the Scottish Government, includes these aspects but focuses also on diet, physical exercise, injuries and the health benefits of a good environment. For more information on these and other projects, visit our page on IOM's Environmental HIA Projects.