Environmental and living conditions in urban environments are a key priority as they impact substantially the health and wellbeing of the majority of European citizens. Health statistics indicate that despite higher exposures to negative environmental agents, life-expectancy in Europe is higher in urban than in rural areas. Sustainable mobility, resource usage such as energy consumption, water and food, and healthy occupational settings are required to promote healthy living in urban areas. Healthy living in rural areas implies some of the same needs but likely in a different and often underexplored fashion.
The research gaps identified in this area are cross-cutting and pursue integrated and holistic approaches directly addressing the vision of the HERA interim research agenda. Specifically, research in this area faces challenges such as, i) Drivers of the interventions are often responses to global change and its challenges and therefore ignorant of potential health impacts (see also RG1); ii) Interventions in environmental settings and living conditions are longterm, by definition complex and nearly always alter multiple exposures with small impacts on health per se (see also RG2); iii) Interventions affect to a varying degree specific diseases as well as wellbeing and their potential to promote healthy living may vary by life-stage and morbidity states (see also RG4); iv) Methods for complex assessments of long-term changes are just evolving (see also RG5) and v) Based on the complexity of the potential interventions, large infrastructures and especially large cohort studies spanning across the lifecourse and implementing long-term follow-ups in multiple European countries are needed to gather novel data on these issues and inform needed impact assessments (see also RG6).
RG 3.1 Healthy Urban Environments
Provide a comprehensive assessment of healthy urban environments
Establish role of healthy urban environments
Large scale cohorts mapping the Europe-wide setting and integrating ongoing long-term efforts
Identification of health benefits of mobility
Research assessing the link between urbanisation, climate change and health
RG 3.2 Clean air policies
Provide innovative research to support future comprehensive clean air policies
Impact of air pollution on multiple diseases
Implementation research is needed to guide future interventions and novel technological developments
RG 3.3 changing work and employment conditions
Priority areas focus on rapidly changing work and employment conditions
RG 3.4 Digitalisation
Research assessing its health impact from environmental perspectives
RG 3.5 Food, ecosystem services and farming
Identify protective features of ecosystem services and traditional farming
Develop environmental risk assessment approaches to investigate how to redesign the food system
RG 3.6 Health co-benefits and harms and social inequalities in a transition period
Identification of health co-benefits and harms of the transition to a zero carbon
Research on health consequences of expected sectorial changes
Research to study technological solutions to improve environmental conditions
Research addressing jointly the long-term impacts of economic, social and environmental conditions
RG 3.7 Methods in implementation research
Develop methods to study the efficiency of implementation of change in the field of environment and health
Research approaches that integrate observational studies and experiments