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ETC Human health and the environment (ETC HE)

Project

The European Topic Centre on Human Health and the Environment (ETC HE) is a Consortium of 10 partners with expertise in air quality, air pollution, industrial emissions, chemicals, noise and environmental health.

The lead institution of the ETC HE is the Environment and Climate Institute NILU (NO), supported by the German Environment Agency who acts as a scientific co-coordinator.

The ETC HE assists the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the following areas:

- Better understanding of health impacts form environment and climate pressures

- Benefits to well-being delivered by healthy environments

- Supporting policy implementation: Air quality, Air pollutant emissions, Chemicals, Environmental noise, Industrial releases

- Exploring links between environment/climate pressures and social inequalities, socio-economic dimensions

- Zero pollution ambition for a toxic free environment

- Chemical strategy for sustainability

- Just transition.

Knowledge support for the European Climate and Health Observatory: infectious diseases and ground-level ozone

Project

The European Climate and Health Observatory (Observatory) is developed in a partnership of several European institutions and organizations. EEA maintains the Observatory, which is hosted on the European climate adaptation portal Climate‐ADAPT. The Observatory has developed into a portal that provides information on climate and human health in Europe, in response to European and national policy developments.  Impacts of climate change on health, indicators on climate and health, various information systems and tools including early warning systems on climate and health and case studies of implemented solutions are among the elements that are being developed in the Observatory.

The workplan for years 2021‐2022 of the Observatory has thematic focus on heat impacts on health and on climate‐sensitive infectious diseases, and the ClimaObs project is supporting these topics. The general objective of the project is to contribute to the Observatory by providing knowledge products suitable for inclusion in the Observatory, including visual information, descriptions, and data.

The project aims to deliver the following knowledge products:  

  • Description of occurrence in Europe for selected diseases  ii
  • Analysis of changes in disease seasonality in relation to climatic conditions for selected diseases
  • Disease forecasting outputs for pilot disease
  • Webpage on health effects of ground‐level ozone under the changing climate