The Challenge
Rising temperatures, more extreme weather, and increasing carbon dioxide levels impact on water and food supply, degrade living conditions, increase social inequities, change vector ecology, increase air pollution and allergens, and impact on water quality. These in turn impact on heat-related illness and death, cardiovascular failure, injuries, vector-borne and water-borne diseases, asthma, cardiovascular disease, respiratory allergies, and mental health. The direct damage costs to health are estimated to be between AUD $3-6 billion/year by 2030.
Currently there is no national digital representation of environmental and health indicators at a local level, to enable policy makers, health managers and researchers to identify vulnerable populations, predict future disease burden and plan for a changing climate in a coordinated, timely manner.
Our present system includes a range of research and policy advocates, data infrastructure agencies, and government health and environment agencies. However, data sets are still partial and siloed; analyses and predictions are limited and slow; and the capacity for managers to make timely, informed decisions is compromised.
Vision
To establish AusEnHealth as a nationally trusted, continuously evolving environmental health intelligence capability.
Partners
The AusEnHealth project benefits from contributions by researchers and practitioners across participating partner organisations, including: Queensland University of Technology, NGIS, Curtin University, University of Canberra, University of Queensland, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN). The initiative is also supported by the HEAL Network, Clean Air and health Research Data and Analysis Technology (CARDAT), University of Sydney, Burnet Institute, University of New South Wales, University of Western Australia, Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and Sax Institute.
The Solution
Australians face increasing climate and environmental health risks due to the impacts of extreme heat, smoke, pollution, flooding and infectious diseases, with particularly acute impacts on vulnerable populations.
There is a clear need for:
- Nationally focused and locally relevant data to support decision-making
- Longitudinal intelligence to assess trends and scenarios
- National coordination and preparedness
The AusEnHealth platform will give researchers and policy makers ready-to-use indicators linking environmental conditions – including heat, air quality and water quality – to health outcomes, without the raw-data processing that limits current sources.
This free and open platform will deliver:
- Data catalogue and visualisation tools
- National-scale pre-canned data products and on-the-fly analytics
- Local area risks, vulnerabilities and cross-domain insights
- Scenario and adaptation tools for decision-making
- Trusted evidence base and rigorous methodologies
Imagine if you wanted to analyse 30 years of climate data and explore health outcome relationships – you’d spend days or weeks finding it, downloading, cleaning and processing it. AusEnHealth has already done that work, so the end user can focus on answering their question rather than preparing the data.
– Aiden Price, Data Analytics Lead, QUT
Intended Impact
At this point, there is no national digital representation of environmental and health indicators at a local level to enable policy makers, health managers and researchers to identify vulnerable populations, predict future disease burden, and plan for a changing climate. This project will lay the foundation for an open-access Australian Environmental Health (AusEnHealth) strategic resource: a national digital environmental health decision support platform to access, visualise and analyse environmental health data, reports and models, and provide tools to support adaptation planning, vulnerability assessment and decision making.
To learn more about this exciting project or how FrontierSI can assist, contact us at contact@frontiersi.com.au.