Connecting the Dots Between Geohealth Research and Health Policy – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: GeoHealth

The field of geohealth, which can be described as research that links environmental factors with benefits or detriments to human health, is becoming formalized as a scientific discipline of its own. Calder and Schartup [2023] argue that, although this type of research is critical for documenting the potential impacts of, say, a polluting agent on the health of a particular population, it typically doesn’t include the critical economic, social, and health and non-health trade-offs that better inform policy.

The authors use fish consumption advisories as an example, which are intended to limit exposure of sensitive populations (children and pregnant women) to toxicants such as mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that can be found in certain fish and seafood. Although the population-level health data exists to support the cautions provided by these advisories, fish and seafood are also low-fat, high-protein foods rich in micronutrients and shown to provide substantial cardiovascular and neurodevelopmental health benefits.

Additionally, the advisories themselves can be inaccessible to the individuals targeted to benefit due to sign placement along waterways, language of signage, and poor communication of the fish species to be avoided and the vulnerable populations that should avoid them. The authors call for more training, more funding, and more inclusion of the social, economic, and communication sciences in bridging the critical gap between geohealth research and health policy benefits.

Citation: Calder, R. S. D., & Schartup, A. T. (2023). Geohealth policy benefits are mediated by interacting natural, engineered, and social processes. GeoHealth, 7, e2023GH000858. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GH000858

—Gabriel Filippelli, Editor in Chief, GeoHealth

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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