The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convenes a diverse standing committee, referred to as the Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI), to address complex environmental health problems involving many stakeholders and interconnected systems. The EHMI will focus on addressing these complex problems as an interconnected, multi-sectoral, multi-faceted system, focusing on cumulative impacts from environmental stressors and working with diverse stakeholders from the local-level (i.e., communities within the United States) to international levels, and across a diversity of institutions, sectors, scientific disciplines, and backgrounds. The EHMI will:

• Engage diverse stakeholders in an ongoing and participatory manner
• Work with scientists across disciplines, sectors, backgrounds, and institutions to bring existing scientific knowledge to inform measures for assessing, preventing, adapting, and mitigating environmental health challenges, and identify critical, outstanding scientific questions
• Catalyze the development of trusted networks of scientists and stakeholders at the local, state, territorial, Tribal, and federal levels to enable identification of locally- or nationally-relevant solutions (including clinical, environmental, societal, educational, and policy measures), and reap potential benefits of prevention and mitigation measures
• Understand the causal effects of policies and measures on other parts of the interconnected ecosystem to identify unanticipated consequences (beneficial and/or harmful) of individual actions throughout the broader system
• Provide expert scientific input during crises to offer specific and strategic evidence-based advice

The EHMI will marshal leadership and the intellectual capacity of the National Academies’ seven programs, expert volunteers, and policy and community leaders at various levels to tackle multi-faceted, systemic environmental health problems. The EHMI committee will be diverse, comprising of academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations; community leaders; policy experts; and others with relevant expertise and experience from the United States and other countries. This committee will work with a liaison group, comprised of representatives from sponsor organizations, federal agencies, and local community groups, and a National Academies’ staff group, comprised of staff working in relevant boards and divisions. Using the momentum created since the inception of this initiative in 2017, EHMI will focus on community engagement and representation in addition to expanding the committee expertise to include economic and social sciences.