Monitoring changing environments in environmental health

Changes in the relationship between people and the environment have always played a major part in determining the professional direction of Environmental Health. The agricultural revolution, industrialisation, and now globalisation, have each led to a fresh set of environmental risks and so to a need for new and different monitoring methods. With global environmental changes such as climate change, monitoring tools are needed that are able to evaluate changes in the patterns of existing risks to health, and also the local effects of long-term global risks to air, water, soils and food. This paper examines the current status of these global environmental changes, and in particular the shared agenda between environmental health and sustainable development. In the light of this shared agenda, the paper reviews the fresh focus brought to environmental health monitoring by the adoption of the Pressure-State- Response framework developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This framework calls for forward projections of sustainable practices as well as the assessment of existing risk. A further development of the OECD framework is proposed through (a) incorporating the potential for changing systems of environmental management, and (b) linking community, specialised, strategic, and visionary knowledge in a networked information base.