Project Details

With reference to the declaration of the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health, which took place in Parma, Italy, in 2010, the WHO Regional Office for Europe published the report "Environmental health inequalities in Europe" in 2012. This report showed for the first time that environmental health inequalities occur in all sub-regions and in all countries of the WHO European Region. An international team of experts worked together with the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health to update this report, which was published in 2019.

The research team of the Department of Social Epidemiology of the Institute of Public Health and Nursing Research, as part of this international team, conducted four systematic reviews on social inequalities in relation to a lack of environmental resources (green and blue spaces), and exposure to environmental noise, air pollution (in collaboration with Staffordshire University, UK) and environmental chemicals. These reviews focus on the European region of the WHO and contributed significantly as background information to the update of the WHO report on environmental health inequalities in Europe. In addition, the team from the Social Epidemiology Department wrote the chapter on social inequalities due to subjective noise annoyance for the update of the WHO report. Gabriele Bolte has been involved in the work on environmental health inequalities of the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health as an invited expert since 2009. 

In May 2019, the Department of Social Epidemiology of the IPP was designated as the WHO Col-laborating Centre for Environmental Health Inequalities by the WHO. As a WHO CC, the Department of Social Epidemiology supports the WHO with its expertise in the research area of social inequalities in environment and health. This includes in particular the observation of the extent, spatial patterns and temporal trends of health-related environmental inequalities in Europe as well as the development of a concept for estimating the health consequences of socially unequally distributed environmental burdens and resources. In cooperation with the European Centre for Environment and Health (ECEH) of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, the main activities of the WHO CC are:

• to continue and further develop international reporting on health-related environmental inequalities in Europe,
• the development of new indicators for measuring health-related environmental inequalities in Europe,
• the development of methodological concepts for estimating the health consequences of socially unequally distributed environmental burdens and resources, taking particular account of the varying vulnerability of different social groups,
• the provision of teaching and presentation modules on health-related environmental inequalities and their implementation in future WHO courses and workshops.

Further information: https://www.uni-bremen.de/who-collaborating-centre-for-environmental-health-inequalities/