Health: Targets

The 10-Year Implementation Plan sets out the following two-, six- and ten-year targets for guiding the health-related work on GEOSS:

2-Year Targets

• Advocate new, high-resolution Earth observations relevant to health needs.
• Facilitate the establishment of exchanges between health care experts in developed countries, developing countries, and indigenous communities to ensure a global perspective of the challenges and some coordinated development of a network to address problems and to leverage Earth Observation systems where appropriate.
• Facilitate mechanisms that help to translate the needs of health data users into requirements that Earth Observation data providers can address.
• Promote the development of an integrated public health information network database that includes information relevant to human health officials and agencies, and includes multi-scaled, multi-temporal spatial data collected from remote sensing data sources, to provide better predictive models of the effects of environmental factors affecting human health and well-being.
• Facilitate development of data products and systems that integrate Earth science databases with health and epidemiological information. This includes social and infrastructure data needed in decision support systems for health care planning and delivery. For example, in places having no water quality data but large populations with a reduced life span, the best way to improve health may be to monitor water quality/drinking water, implement water purification, and inform the public about the need to use purified water.
• Advocate enhancements to international networks and systems needed to support Earth Observation data sharing in areas of human health.
  Produce a comprehensive gaps analysis of existing capacity building programmes and aggressively promote initiatives for improved coordination.
• Advocate, within its field of competence, an increase in collaborative research programmes between developed and developing country scientists and indigenous communities, to their mutual benefit.
• Facilitate the ability to overlay on epidemiology maps the variety of relevant inventoried and processed data, including meteorological, aerosol, ocean and land features, demographic, and infrastructure. This kind of overlay map will be created through interoperable databases and services provided by existing national and international Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs).
• Facilitate reductions in the lag time in the temporal collection and assimilation of human health data (in some cases, this can mean years) and the “real-time” synoptic data that is collected by remote sensing systems.
• Facilitate provision of historical remote sensing data that can be used for tracking or monitoring environmental changes as precursors for what exists today and for modelling future human health scenarios.
• Facilitate identification of technical needs in terms of instrumentation and data products that will yield useful epidemiological data at the community level.

6-Year Targets

• Produce an inventory of available Earth remote sensing and ground-based databases that can be associated with known health problems such as asthma, pollutant exposure, birth defects, seafood contamination and certain infectious and vector-borne diseases. This includes remote sensing and ground-based databases, historic data sets encompassing well characterized epidemics, and gaps in human health related environmental data (e.g. places where water, soil, or air quality are not measured.) To accomplish this, GEOSS will develop the tools, architecture and infrastructure for a public health information network data base that can be accessed and used by the public health community at large to obtain historical and current health data for better predictability of environmental effects on human health.
• Facilitate further development of remotely sensed maps describing the global system for sources, transport and sinks/deposition of gasses and aerosols, and systems characterizing atmospheric, soil, river and coastal pollution.
• Facilitate human health community input to the technical specification of new major environmental observation capabilities, including in situ and remotely sensed observations.
• Facilitate the development of sets of environment and infrastructural determinants of health, e.g. sanitation, transport, energy, communications, traffic management systems, and housing.
• Facilitate the development of the tools and processes needed to address health concerns and develop a useful regional network of experts and information databases, working primarily through the GEOSS coordination group for health described above.
• Facilitate the establishment of a coordinating group focused on health organizations as users of Earth Observation data and information. This outreach and information sharing group must engage developed and developing country health communities to ensure a global perspective of the challenges and to catalyze a global network to address problems.
• Advocate the development of indicators of human health based on environmental measurements.
• Facilitate the development of monitoring methods and systems to detect early evidence of health-related changes and to further inform epidemiological modeling studies.
• Facilitate coordinated approaches to the integration of environmental monitoring parameters with vectors, animal reservoirs of disease, and clinical admissions.
• Facilitate the development of mechanisms for alerting public health professionals to hazardous conditions identified by environmental monitoring.
• Facilitate the availability of wide-area health parameters derived from satellite data, e.g. sanitation, transport, energy, communications, traffic management systems, and housing.
• Facilitate the development of geochemical baseline data and maps, such as trace element toxicity and deficiencies.

10-Year Targets

• Facilitate access and usability of data needed to assess health vulnerabilities of human populations and support decisions at the local, regional and global scales.
• Facilitate the early detection and control of environmental risks to human health through improvements in the sharing and integration of Earth observations, monitoring, and early warning systems, databases, models and communications systems.
• Advocate the formation of a global community of operational and academic researchers who use remote sensing data in a standard format to characterize epidemiological associations with disease.
• Advocate better on-ground disease surveillance, linked with open national reporting practices, for better understanding and documentation of environmental influences on infectious, chronic and other diseases and disorders.
• Facilitate improved methods to fill in gaps from in situ to remote sensors. For example, improved methods may be appropriate to integrate data from in situ water and soil quality monitoring at specific points with remotely sensed water and soil characterizations of whole watersheds.
• Advocate community-based research that involves the collaboration of people living or working in a community with scientists to design and execute research projects to solve community environmental health problems.
• Facilitate sharing of environmental monitoring data and collection methods. This may stimulate greater environmental protection and improved health at all levels and in all settings.