Environment and health (E&H) research is a broad and complex field of study, defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as those aspects of human well-being and disease that are determined by environmental factors. Activities related to assessment and management, such as defining policies and strategies, are also part of the E&H field. Actors in the field are therefore dispersed across several (often segregated) organisational structures, including governmental guidance bodies, funding and programming bodies, and public or industrial research operators. Stakeholders in the field also include many non-governmental organizations and the general public.
The objectives of the ERA-ENVHEALTH project are to join together the financers and programmers of research in health environment to establish a perennial collaboration between the various organizations by studying the results and methods in these various organizations, by defining priority sets of themes and while answering there by joint activities and transnational calls for projects of research. ERA-ENVHEALTH will bring dynamism to Environment and Health research in Europe by promoting collaboration between research programmes and fostering innovative idea.
The originality of ERA-ENVHEALTH is to start with a trans-national joint call in order to experiment joint funding and to fully assess the implementation of this joint programme. ERA-ENVHEALTH is a contribution to the European E&H Action Plan 2004-2010, promoting the better use of E&H research results to support policy development, and to better anticipate issues affecting the public.
