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What HEIMTSA will provide
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A
Methodology for health impact and cost benefit analysis, so that
overall environment and health impacts caused by releases of substances
into the environment from all relevant human activities can be
evaluated at the European level, as reliably as practicable given
current knowledge.
That methodology will consist of a linked series of scientific reports
and papers, publicly available, published as they become finalised, yet
making a coherent whole which will be made transparent via strategic
overview papers. In addition, policy briefs will be prepared to support
dissemination of results to policy makers. The methodology itself will
use the full-chain approach; will take account of pollution mixtures;
and will incorporate uncertainty assessment integrally. To ensure
relevance, it will be developed in ongoing dialogue with, and input
from, the user community (European Commission, national agencies,
industries, NGO stakeholders). Scientifically it will use the
Consortium’s established multi-disciplinary expertise, and active links
with the research community and other relevant projects, to build on
and integrate best available knowledge.
The IAS will
consist of an integrated set of stand-alone (‘loose-coupled’) modules,
designed to link together seamlessly, in order to demonstrate the
impact of a range of policies on health. This system will cover
emissions of all relevant substances into air, water and soil, the
transmission and chemical transformation of these substances across all
environmental media, and include indoor air quality and road traffic
noise as key stressors as well. Besides investigating the status quo in
the base year 2005, a baseline development of emissions and impacts,
assuming a business-as-usual development incorporating all policies
currently in place or in pipeline for a time horizon from 2010 and 2020
to 2050 will be defined in close cooperation with stakeholders.
Starting from this pathway of anticipated development, alternative
‘what-if?’ policy scenarios will be derived to demonstrate the effects
of such policies on human health impacts. These scenarios will consist
of emission sets in high temporal and spatial resolution to account for
the spatial and temporal variability of both emissions and exposures.
The IAS will closely link models and datasets for an integrated,
cross-media impact assessment, implementing the assessment chain for a
first time covering the full impact pathway. This close-coupled
modelling system will allow for a full exploration of trade-offs and
synergies of individual policy options and provide at the same time
flexibility for the evaluation of different variations of policy
options. The models will be operated as a distributed system, run and
maintained by the model developers. The individual modules will be
linked via fast internet based data exchange protocols (e.g.
implementing GRID FTP). In addition to that, a prototype for a reduced
set of functions allowing for fast, coarse assessments, and operated
via a web interface by users directly, will be established.
Results
from using the IAS to apply the methodology for health impact and
cost-benefit assessment of realistic policy scenarios at the European
level.
The
scenarios will not only include sectoral policies (like changes in
transport or agricultural policies) but also scenarios that aim at
reducing risks to human health in a most effective way, i.e. with least
costs by implementing the most effective measures across all sectors.
The results will be evaluated and interpreted and policy briefs will be
prepared for ready dissemination of results to policy makers.
Partly this will be achieved through
development and dissemination of the methodology and the project
results, and is measurable e.g. through citations of publications from
the project.
The
most immediate measurable indicator, however, is the increased numbers
of individuals in the EU-30 trained in HIA/CBA methods as part of the
current project. This will be achieved using a training version of DST
that will be disseminated through web with user registration, and two
workshops. These will be developed in close liaison with users and
other researchers. We will target
(i) potential institutional users of HIA/CBA on national and international level
(ii) within the relevant research communities (e.g. environment and
health; valuation; uncertainty assessment; IAS modelling) and, of
course, within the HEIMTSA team itself.
By ‘environment and health impacts’ in this context we understand those
impacts on health (of anthropogenic actions described in policy
scenarios) that arise via environmental media – air, soil and water.
These include processes operating both a) via simple pathways and
single routes of exposure, such as air pollution of outdoor origin
(i.e. the pathway from emissions to exposure by breathing), and b)
complex pathways and multiple routes of exposure, for example the
effects of dietary and inhalation exposure to carcinogenic PAHs.
Additionally, policy scenarios may have socio-economic and societal
effects – for example, effects on (un)employment – which in turn have
effects on health. These are taken into account to the extent to which
they involve environmental processes, but they are not otherwise a
focus of the present study.
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