We concentrate on their use of an integrated methodology, i.e., the methods and tools for environmental health monitoring, for data linkage between environment and health endpoints,
and for environmental health decisions-making support.
In our assessment, we focus specifically on (i) aim/purpose; (ii) geographic scope; (iii) project duration; (iv) informationabout meta-data, and (v) data integration (Additional file 5) of the programmes, as these five properties determine their potential for supporting informed decision-making.
We identify three types of monitoring programmes:
- International programmes, with the objective of documenting trends of pollution and comparing
trends across countries, including a wide range of indicators, e.g., AMAP and ENHIS.
- National programmes, with the objective of documenting general health trends which focus on
health based indicators, e.g., GerES, EHMS, PCBs in Slovakia and KiGGS.
-National programmes, with the objective of following up a specific risk, including both observation and forecasting, e.g., HWWS and ONERC.
The most common challenges that limit wider use of data from these programmes, beyond their scope andpurpose, are:
Knowledge limitations: (i) narrow focus, such as targeting individual environmental stressors
(e.g., PCBs in Slovakia), monitoring only one aspect of E&H problems, for example, monitoring the environment (e.g., GerES), or human health (e.g., KiGGS), but rarely integrating both.
The AMAP focused on monitoring the levels of various pollutants in the Arctic (i.e., persistent organic contaminants, mercury, cadmium, lead, radioactivity, acidification and arctic haze, petroleum hydrocarbon pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion) and assessing the effects of pollution in several environmental compartments and the human population, yet was recently advised to improve integration in the context of climate together with related ecosystem or biodiversity [34]; (ii) complexity, uncertainty and lack of understanding of the underlying questions.
Current monitoring programmes are mainly focused on priority pollutants (e.g., particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs)), yet fail to rapidly include novel insights on emerging issues, such as climate change, waterborne stressors, ionizing and non-ionizing radioactivity [4,35], and (iii) lack of methods and tools to integrate data.
Data issues: (i) data availability. The ENHIS project found no data on air quality or bathing water quality for 43% of the EU population [36]; (ii) data sharing/accessibility.
Due to privacy and confidentiality issues, human biomonitoring and health effects data are difficult to access, such as data from the PCBs projects in Slovakia and the EHMS project in the Czech Republic.
The AMAP identified data access and sharing as key areas requiring improvement [34]; (iii) lack of harmonization between datasets.
The ENHIS project found information gaps in harmonization and new data generation for E&H policies [37]; (iv) data geographical coverage.
ENHIS has disclosed a limitation of the road network database, namely that it is missing big busy roads within the cities [36].
The PCBs projects in Slovakia did not provide sufficient data on the magnitude and hot-spots of
PCBs-related health effects [38].
A human biomonitoring(HBM) subproject under the EHMS project only concerns urban and suburban populations in four selected regions.
Improvement of the geographical coverage of existing monitoring programmes is needed [39].
Low degree of interdisciplinary: The programmesdiscussed above claim the involvement of a large number of disciplines; however, there are few monitoring programmes which are truly interdisciplinary [40].
For instance, the HWWS project in France only gathers inputs from two disciplines (meteorology and public health science) to assess the complex risks from heat waves and support decision-making.
Language barrier: one additional limiting issue of national environmental health monitoring programmes isthat reports are often written only in the national language(e.g., the HWWS and ONERC programmes are only documented in French).
These gaps, together with data quality/data accuracy issues, have prevented a fuller integration of investigations of the health effects of environmental stressors at a European level, leading to overlapping efforts, and a lack of common meta-data development for policy decisions.
Data sharing is not as simple as it would appear.
Data collection is highly programme specific, and the nature of the data collected, the intended purpose of the data collection, and the level of ethical and intellectual property concerns are decided on a programme-by-programmelevel [41].
Integrated environmental health monitoring: a conceptual framework The need for integrated environmental health monitoring was recognized more than 10 years ago [31,42].
Yet, until now, there has been no concrete achievement [31,43]. The purpose of developing an IEHM framework (Figure 1) is to: (i) serve as a ‘think model’, so that users can apply it in a specific context and modify it according to their requirements, and (ii) provide a basis for further
development of such a framework for a realistic IEHM programme.
An operative framework is important when developing and utilizing an IEHM programme. A systematic E&H approach based on such a framework facilitates the analysis of the whole natural-eco-anthropogenic system, or elements of this system [44,45].
The broad context of natural-eco-anthropogenic systems includes human health, cultural, social, economic, and political variables; and allows for more explicit links between the state of the environment and human welfare.
Identification of these explicit links within the broader hazard surveillance category introduces the concept of surveillance of indirect hazards (e.g., biodiversity) [46,47].
In defining IEHM, we use the linear DPSEEA as an operational framework to identify the links between environment and health, and the entry points for action.
We then extended this framework into four principles that capture how natural-eco-anthropogenic systems interact and how the linear DPSEEA framework and natural-ecoanthropogenicsystems components are linked: (1) monitoring entire systems rather than unlinked individual components;
(2) addressing the spatial-time dimensions of the system; (3) monitoring dynamic processes rather than static elements; and (4) designing methods and tools that would enable realising the goal of helping decision-making.
Monitoring linear DPSEEA operational framework
The IEHM aims to improve our knowledge of causal links between E&H, as causality cannot be established by simply monitoring environmental factors and health outcomes simultaneously [48].
The pathways from source to exposure and to health effects are complex, and require additional information, e.g., on internal dose [49] or pharmacokinetic processes.
In our IEHM framework (Figure 1), we combine DPSEEA (left part of the Figure 1)
with natural-eco-anthropogenic systems (right part of theFigure 1).
The IEHM framework addresses the needs that arise along the cause-effect diagram, and the fact that knowledge is imperfect, by monitoring a wide range of driving forces, pressures, states, exposure and health effect variables, and using this information to identify casual links, and help decision-making.
Central to this concept is exposure, which requires that people are present both at the place and at the time of a hazardous event.
The concept of exposure is best developed in relation to pollutants in environmental media and
the pollutant dose, i.e., the amount of the pollutant circulating in the human body as a result of assimilation, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) processes.
From this perspective, biomarkers and human biomonitoring are necessary tools for the IEHM, as they are integrators of aggregate and/or cumulative exposure and effects [50].