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Health and Environment CoP
The Health and Environment CoP, whose members include national and international organizations, seeks to address the user perspective on issues involving environment and health, with an emphasis on using environmental observations to improve health decision-making at the international, regional, country, and district levels.
The CoP held three workshops in 2009 and 2010 to convene GEO members and others interested in contributing, and has been exploring possibilities for partnering with user communities and other support mechanisms.
Areas of interest include information architecture for the environment, ecosystems, climate, and health; oceans, water quality, and health; vector-borne disease; and disasters and health.
The CoP supports several ongoing projects in GEO’s Work Plan involving:
- Health information systems integrating Earth observation remote-sensing
imagery as a contributor to the World Health Organization’s OpenHealth
information system.
- Health monitoring and prediction systems for aerosol impacts on health and
the environment, air quality observations and forecasting, global monitoring of
persistent organic pollutants, and monitoring of atmospheric mercury.
- End-to-end projects for health aimed at implementing a meningitis decision-support
tool and a globally coordinated malaria warning system, and at
describing the linkage between ecosystems, biodiversity, and health in order to
integrate these components into decision-support tools.
Members also have expressed interest in several new CoP efforts, including the
Vibrio disease-causing bacteria that inhabit coastal waters; the link between
biodiversity/landscape change and infectious diseases; and the influence of
weather/climate and airborne sand and dust on northern African meningitis.
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