Response to Behbod B et al. Environmental and Public Health Tracking to Advance Knowledge for Planetary Health

The Viewpoint on Environmental Public Health Tracking by Behbod et al. is both welcome and timely.¹ We need new ways to characterize, monitor, and respond to the changing nature and distribution of environmental stresses; new challenges as well as old ones affecting us in unexpected ways. It is important that the public health community re-evaluates the role and application of routine environmental monitoring and service data and learns to apply these using innovative methods. Another dynamic is the apparent divergence between professional and lay interests reflected in a research focus on large-scale issues such as climate change rather than the more immediate local impacts of a poor quality physical, economic and social environment. Developing an effective response is complicated by the interactions between environmental, biological and social systems meaning that relatively little is actually known about which parts of the contemporary environment, or combinations thereof, have the most important effects or indeed how. However one thing is abundantly clear as Behbod identifies; poor people are almost invariably more exposed to environmental and public health pressures.² There is also an emerging consensus that there is something about being poor that makes people more vulnerable to those exposures, an indefensible injustice.²

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