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Building a Methodological Foundation for Impactful Urban Planetary Health Science

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Abstract

Anthropogenic environmental change will heavily impact cities, yet associated health risks will depend significantly on decisions made by urban leaders across a wide range of non-health sectors, including transport, energy, housing, basic urban services, and others. A subset of planetary health researchers focus on understanding the urban health impacts of global environmental change, and how these vary globally and within cities. Such researchers increasingly adopt collaborative transdisciplinary approaches to engage policy-makers, private citizens, and other actors in identifying and evaluating potential policy solutions that will reduce environmental impacts in ways that simultaneously promote health, equity, and/or local economies—in other words, maximising ‘co-benefits’. This report presents observations from a participatory workshop focused on challenges and opportunities for urban planetary health research. The workshop, held at the 16th International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH) in Xiamen, China, in November 2019, brought together 49 participants and covered topics related to collaboration, data, and research impact. It featured research projects funded by the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet Our Health (OPOH) programme. This report aims to concisely summarise and disseminate participants’ collective contributions to current methodological practice in urban planetary health research.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the input from Lukasz Aleksandrowicz at Wellcome Trust, Paul Wilkinson at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, our project teams and partners, and the workshop participants themselves. In sharing these findings, we seek to inform colleagues who did not attend the ICUH conference, a decision that could be informed by a desire to reduce personal carbon emissions, among other factors.

Funding

The Wellcome Trust funded the following projects, which contributed to this paper: Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health [209387/Z/17/Z], Salud Urbana enAmérica Latina (SALURBAL)/Urban Health in Latin America [205177/Z/16/Z], Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments [205222/B/16/Z], Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities [209376/Z/17/Z]. Support was also provided by Strategy and Technology Research on Climate Change Health Risk Assessment funded by National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, University College London, Central House, 14 Upper Woburn Place, London, WC1H 0NN, UK

    Helen Pineo

  2. Department of Geography, School of Global Affairs, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    Camilla Audia

  3. Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, First Floor, 5 Tyndall Avenue, Bristol, BS8 1UD, UK

    Daniel Black

  4. Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University, 8 Scenic Blvd, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Matthew French

  5. School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada

    Emily Gemmell

  6. Urban Health Collaborative, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University, 3600 Market St 7th Floor, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Gina S. Lovasi

  7. Department of Public Health, Environments and Society, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 15-17 Tavistock Place, London, WC1H 9SH, UK

    James Milner

  8. Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Cra 1E#19A-40, Bogota, Colombia

    Felipe Montes

  9. State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 155 Changbai Road, Beijing, 102206, China

    Yanlin Niu

  10. CONACYT ─ National Institute of Public Health, Avenida Universidad 655, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

    Carolina Pérez-Ferrer

  11. Our Planet Our Health, Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE, UK

    José Siri

  12. Public Health Faculty, Hasanuddin University, Jl. Perintis Kemerdekaan KM 10, Makassar, Indonesia

    Ruzka R. Taruc

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  1. Helen Pineo
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  2. Camilla Audia
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  3. Daniel Black
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  5. Emily Gemmell
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  7. James Milner
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  9. Yanlin Niu
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Contributions

JS proposed the workshop contents and structure, which were further developed by all authors. All authors participated in preparing and running the workshop. HP wrote the introduction, workshop participants, and conclusion sections and edited the paper. CA wrote the section on collaboration. CPF and JM wrote the data section. DB, EG and YN wrote the impact section. All authors commented on drafts.

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Correspondence to Helen Pineo.

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Pineo, H., Audia, C., Black, D. et al. Building a Methodological Foundation for Impactful Urban Planetary Health Science. J Urban Health 98, 442–452 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-020-00463-5

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