Impact/Purpose:

Environmental and public health policy continues to evolve in response to new and complex social, economic and environmental drivers. Globalization and centralization of commerce, evolving patterns of land use and technological advances in manufacturing and genetically modified foods have created new and complex classes of stressors and risks. Although human living standards are linked to the integrity of natural resources, efforts to link human health, ecological condition and socioeconomics have been disjointed. The purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of the causal linkages between policy decisions and their consequences with respect to economic productivity and environmental quality, as well as the methods and tools to evaluate policy options for their consequences. The science needed to support this understanding includes determining the impact of human activity patterns on human well-being as mediated through the environment, as well as identifying the information and tools needed to support decisions directed towards human and environmental well-being.

Description:

This research involves collaboration with other ORD Labs and Centers, as well as external collaborators, to foster integration of assessment approaches used to evaluate human health and ecological risks and to demonstrate integrated environmental socioeconomic approaches. Partnerships have been formed to foster integration of assessment approaches to evaluate human health and ecological risks. Planning is underway to conduct an actual integrated risk assessment focusing on a risk problem with high visibility to the international environmental community. A second area of research is focusing on the methods needed to support linking ecological and economic attributes, as well as understanding how these linkages can be evaluated to permit future assessments. A project has been initiated to develop a multi-scale, multi-issue process that integrates economic and ecological information to support decision making, and to illustrate how the process captures the cascading and ascending linkages from a local watershed scale to an entire region. This research involves conducting a large-scale emergy analysis of states and regions, developing a spatial model and emergy analysis of landscapes, and comparing emergy analysis and economic methods for determining value.

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