• Home
• About Us
• Funding
• Our Research
• Working with business

• Careers
• Publications
• Press
• Events

Environment & Human Health

Programme background

The Environment & Human Health Programme is a joint three-year inter-disciplinary capacity-building programme supported by NERC, EA, Defra, the MOD, MRC, The Wellcome Trust, ESRC, BBSRC and HPA.

What is the focus of the programme?

The natural environment contributes to people's health through the quality of air we breath, the food we eat and the water we drink.

It offers health enhancing economic and recreational opportunities on the one hand but is threatened by many activities such as transport, industrial processes, agricultural and waste management practices on the other.

Environmental pollutants and potentially pathogenic organisms can harm people's health through a series of complex transport and exposure pathways. These are areas of growing public and government interest.

The Environment & Human Health Programme has identified a number of areas of interest and these issues span many scientific disciplines. The programme aims to build multi- and inter-disciplinary research capacity that can effectively tackle the "real-world" multi-and inter-disciplinary problems that we face not only in the UK but also globally. The number of different activities have been identified to build capacity.

The other principle aim of the programme is to identify and prioritise research areas.

The outcomes of the Environment & Human Health Programme will be to:

• create working relationships between academics of different disciplines that can be built on for future multi- and inter-disciplinary research;

• increase in scientific knowledge regarding environment and human health issues;

• inform development of more effective policy and practice to improve human health.

Programme partners

The programme's partners are:

• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
• Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra)
• Environment Agency (EA)
• Ministry of Defence (MOD)
• Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
• Medical Research Council (MRC)
• Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
• Health Protection Agency (HPA)