Grant: Operating Grant: Canadian Environmental Urban Health Research Consortium

With more than 80% of Canada's population living in urban areas and the urbanized proportion of the global population growing dramatically, there is an urgent need to learn how to design and modify cities to improve, not degrade, population health. A concerted effort to address this need would be of tremendous benefit to urban planners and health-related policy makers who are faced with very real issues such as, sprawl, traffic congestion, car-dependency, social equity and sustainability. Our proposed consortium will play a pivotal role in supporting the research needed to address these issues. We will accomplish this by linking standardized environmental exposure data about air quality, green spaces, walkability, noise and other aspects of the urban/suburban environment to existing human health data platforms. This will enable studies looking at how these factors affect health, from birth to old age. We will also be able to map, over time, where and how conditions are changing, and how that increases or decreases the risk of health impacts. Our Consortium includes many leading researchers in Canada, and our specific aims by the end of the first five years are to have: •Completed the linkage of the above exposure metrics to individuals in multiple cohorts. •Filled priority gaps in the environmental data identified by environmental health researchers and knowledge users and delivered the existing and new data and methods to the platform. •Worked closely with environmental epidemiologists (CANUE members and others) to generate new knowledge on the association between features of the urban/suburban environment and health outcomes, emphasizing analyses that consider multiple exposures and their interactions.