A new integrated decision-making tool for urban health and policy evaluation: ŒQCumber-envHealth¹ by Duncan Lee

Decision-making and planning in rapidly growing urban centres require integrated assessment tools to determine impacts on environmental exposure, health and well-being and inequalities. However, there is a lack of practical tools of sufficient spatial detail with which to determine current and future integrated exposure and health risks and to evaluate public policy options. In particular, despite the increasing availability of data, environmental datasets are limited to a few urban monitoring sites and information rich health microdata usually have restricted access (for confidentiality reasons). Moreover, spatio-temporal risk models are required to link exposure and health data to health outcomes and hence determine changes in risk from different policy and planning options. The overall aim of this project is create an interactive data platform, for Glasgow as an example urban environment that integrates geographically specific environmental exposure and health data and modelling:

"QCumber-envHealth" to be used to quantify environmental exposure and health risks under different policy scenarios. This project brings together researchers from Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC), and from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde.

In summary, this project will combine leading research, innovative technological developments and insights from end users to deliver the new QCumber-envHealth platform for integrated exposure and health assessment to enable decision-making and planning in urban centres, fulfilling a longstanding market need.

First published: 26 May 2015

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