EuroHealthNet

MISTRAL is developing an innovative digital tool to better understand how environmental, social, and health factors affect people’s wellbeing in cities.

By combining different types of data — including health records, environmental measurements, and socioeconomic information — the project creates a comprehensive picture of how pollution and living conditions impact quality of life.

Read the second edition of their newsletter to learn more about their recent activities, including its stakeholder recommendations on AI for just health, an article on how long-term exposure to industrial pollution in Taranto (Italy) has shaped the experiences and perceptions of different generations, and its upcoming annual meeting on innovation to policy.

The final VALESOR newsletter is out now. In this edition, you can read about the project’s key achievements, including contributions to international conferences, progress in case study work, the submission of final deliverables, and the preparation of policy briefs intended to support evidence-based environmental health decision-making in Europe.

Read the newsletter here.

As outcomes of 3 years of intense EU collaborative research, VALESOR project is delivering concrete results that will shape how Europe assesses the economic impacts of pollution on health. These outcomes are expected to provide policymakers with lasting tools that support the EU’s zero pollution goals and ensure future environmental policies generate measurable public health benefits.

A central area within the VALESOR project has assessed the health burden linked to chemical pollution exposure and demonstrating how improved regulation can yield significant social and economic gains. As part of the METEOR cluster active in the same research field, VALESOR project has played a pivotal role in this European effort to strengthen policymaking through evidence-based economic valuation. The importance of VALESOR’s contributions lies in harmonising valuation methods that support EU-wide zero pollution ambitions and public health strategies. There is a growing demand across Europe for reliable valuation tools and long-term health impact assessments – a core focus of VALESOR within the METEOR cluster, driving the development of evidence-based solutions for future environmental health policy.

Building collaborative sessions held in different stakeholder workshops and policy sessions held in renowned international conferences like EAERE, SBCA and EPHEC, VALESOR developed an innovative on-line tool building on most recent research. The VALESOR tool is designed to assess health effects and the corresponding economic damage of planned variations in chemical stressors (CHEM module) and air pollution (AIR module). The tool operates with emission reduction scenarios and for each scenario provides users with a set of outputs such as the effects on health (decreased mortality, morbidity) and the expected benefits associated to these effects. The tool allows users to easily test several valuation methods, adjust values of key parameters and directly see changes in the results. VALESOR’s potential users are policymakers, scientists, academia, NGOs – the tool is meant to support their research and decision-making procedures by providing scientific basis for health impact assessments and Cost-Benefit analyses.

A guidance document addressed at stakeholders links the methods developed in the VALESOR project with the VALESOR tools. It provides introductory information on the role and the methods of economic valuation of health impacts from atmospheric pollution and chemical substances and then focusses on guidelines for the quantification and economic valuation of health effects caused by environmental stressors. In this it takes a specific view on the approaches developed and decision made in the development of the VALESOR tool. The guidelines developed are relevant both for Environmental Burden of Disease (EBD), assessing the health burden (costs) for given pollution exposure levels, and Health Impact Analysis (HIA), quantifying the changes in health damage. Both are supported by VALESOR tools. Guidance is adapted, where relevant, to the classical air pollutants on the one hand, and chemical substances on the other hand. Guidelines are also specific to the two valuation approaches relying on the estimation of cases of health impacts (mortality and morbidity) as well as approaches relying on the estimation of quality-adjusted life years (QALY). This more method-oriented guidance report is complemented by tool user guidance explaining the users which data to provide and choices to make in the tools in which order.

For all these reasons, VALESOR is generating strong interest from policymakers and stakeholders across Europe, who are preparing to use its tools to drive healthier communities, more effective regulations and long-term economic gains. Final results will be presented in a final event of the METEOR cluster in Brussels end 2026. More information is available in the upcoming METEOR newsletter.

Contact:
Gildas Appéré Valesor Scientific coordinator

Email: gildas.appere@univ-angers.fr

Urban environmental, climate, and social conditions are major factors for residents’ health and well-being. Air pollution, noise, temperature/heat, lack of green space, physical activity, and socioeconomic status affect health. In recent years, residents have become more aware of the environmental and climate
conditions in their cities. A clean urban environment is now a key factor in a city’s attractiveness.

The new policy briefing from UBDPolicy provides an overview of the key city networks active in the EU and how the EU Agenda for Cities aims to enhance collaboration between the urban, national, and EU levels. It also shows local authorities where to find good practice examples and provides them with science to policy recommendations, for both city- and EU-level decision makers.

The briefing is available in: Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, Polish and Spanish.

The fifth edition of the UBDPolicy newsletter is available to read here.

The Winter 2025 edition of the BEST-COST newsletter looks at the launch of its healthiar R Package and factsheet on socioeconomic equalities, as tools for researchers and policymakers in understanding the health costs of pollution. Progress is also made on the cost monetisation work, including through workshops and the first European Public Health Economics Conference. The newsletter also provides updates on the latest scientific publications from BEST-COST researchers.

Read the newsletter here.

UBDPolicy researchers joined 24 participants at the University of Cambridge for an intensive course on quantitative Health Impact Assessment (19–23 May 2025), combining lectures, group work and idea sharing to strengthen future cooperation in health research. The course on quantitative Health Impact Assessment took place from May 19^th to May 23^th 2025, organised and hosted by the Public Health Modelling Team at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge (UK). A total of 24 participants, from eight different institutions, including 12 UBDpolicy researchers, convened in the West Hub campus for five intense days of learning new tools, discussing ideas, sharing insights and strengthening ties for present and future cooperation in health impact assessment research.

Overall, the training addressed a broad range of questions, including – but not limited to: why do we need mathematical models, and what are their limitations? How do our transportation systems affect our health? How can we measure the environmental factors that impact people’s health, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each method? How can these environmental factors realistically be different from what they are now – also known as scenario development? How will people’s health change for different scenarios? How will a scenario unfold into the future, interacting with many other changes happening at the same time? What follows is a selection of two core themes of the course, distilled to their key messages.

AP and PA: very different, but both highly impactful

Transportation systems impact people’s health through many mechanisms, but two stand out as the most important: exposure to air pollution (AP) and the opportunity for transport-related Physical Activity (PA). We can draw an interesting contrast between these two factors:

• Air pollution increases the risk of many diseases and early death, while physical activity decreases these risks and increases the duration and quality of life.
• Air pollution affects many people at once (although not everyone equally), while physical activity only benefits the individual people who do it.

A change from doing no physical activity to doing a little will greatly improve a person’s health; further increases in the level of physical activity will bring further health improvements, but progressively smaller ones. Walking and cycling are considered active modes of transport because they provide the benefits of physical activity to the people who do them; these benefits outweigh the risks posed by air pollution under most circumstances. Public transport is not an active mode in itself, but most journeys by public transport start and finish with a walking stage, whose health benefits should not be dismissed.

Adding all up with ITHIM

The Public Health Modelling Team developed the Integrated Transport and Health Impact Model (ITHIM), a tool that applies the known links between transport systems and health to produce estimates of health impacts.

ITHIM takes in data describing the travel behaviour in a city of choice: how many trips the people are taking during an average week, how long are these trips, and which transport mode is used (among driving, walking, cycling, and riding public transport). Furthermore, it takes into account how polluted the air already is, how much physical activity the population is already doing, the distribution of the population among various age and sex categories (a.k.a. the demographic make-up), the mortality rate and the frequency of certain diseases of interest happening in the population (a.k.a. the local epidemiology). Finally, one or more transport scenarios are added to the mix. A transport scenario, in this case, is a hypothetical change in the travel behaviour: for example, what would happen if all driving trips under 5km were replaced by walking or cycling trips of the same distance?

ITHIM combines all the data and the scenarios provided to estimate the health impact that would result from each scenario becoming reality. The health impact is estimated in terms of premature deaths or other summary health metrics: for example, a result can look like 100 premature deaths or 40 cases of heart attack prevented every year.

In the second edition of the METEOR newsletter, each project gives updates on its research, policy and communication activities. From scientific publications, to policy briefs, to stakeholder workshops – the projects have been busy addressing different environmental stressors and their health impacts.

Read the newsletter here.