GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

To advance the knowledge on planetary health to support policymaking in this area, the applicants should address several of the following activities:

• Provide strengthened evidence for health and wellbeing impacts of planetary changes, considering a systems thinking framework or a fragmentary approach focused on the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on human health;
• Provide improved understanding and modelling of human–ecological systems interactions and ecosystem-mediated effects on human health and well-being, including the attribution of health outcomes to environmental change;
• Provide a methodology to identify and prioritise threats for public health caused by environmental degradation, with a view to improving preparedness of health systems to these threats, through structured processes that move from evidence to recommendations and decisions;
• Investigation how infections agents that might have the capacity to adapt to other host species can spread via the environment, and how this type of insight might lead to enhanced monitoring strategies;
• Lay the foundations for integrated surveillance systems considering already established monitoring systems (e.g. systematic wastewater monitoring) and using available and newly collected health, socioeconomic, and environmental data for defined populations over longer time periods. This would provide early detection of emerging disease outbreaks (e.g. zoonotic diseases, potential permafrost release of new and old pathogens) or changes in nutrition and non-communicable disease burden and support the assessment of the integrated health, environmental, and socioeconomic effect of policies and technologies.
• Explore strategies to reduce environmental damage and harmful emissions (e.g. air pollution) including assessment of health co-benefits through engagement with relevant HE partnerships and missions;
• Explore implications of planetary health for health systems and public health and identify opportunities to mitigate adverse health impacts of environmental degradation;
• Improve risk communication to policymakers, public authorities, industry and the public and support evidence-informed decisions by policymakers, by increasing capacity to do systematic reviews and provide rigorous policy briefs;
• Advance knowledge and actions to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases while reducing the environmental pressure in areas like nutrition, physical activity, and mobility, and to assess the integrated health, environmental, and socioeconomic effect of those actions (i.e. behaviour change interventions, policies or new technologies);
• Provide better understanding on adaptation to climate and other environmental changes to protect human health, including the interactions between different planetary boundaries and the need to integrate adaptation and mitigation strategies;
• Improved health impact assessment approaches accounting for environmental externalities and estimating the cost and benefits of interventions versus no action.