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Environmental Health Matters Initiative

From the air we breathe to the water we drink, our health is defined by our natural environment. Environmental health is the science that focuses on reducing harmful environmental exposures in air, water, soil and food to protect human health and well-being, as well as provide all communities with healthier environments.

The Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI) convenes government, industry, and academic leaders to share ideas and form connections that inspire the development of solutions to our most pressing environmental health challenges.

Completed

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"We convene government, industry, and academic leaders to share ideas that inspire solutions to keep our environments healthy and thriving."

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Core Themes
Systems-based Approach

EHMI uses a systems-based approach to address multifaceted environmental health challenges, including health disparities. This approach recognizes environmental and human health issues as complex, interconnected, multi-layered, and multi-faceted systems. EHMI also focuses on approaching the cumulative impacts of various environmental stressors that people experience throughout their lives.

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Multidisciplinary

Through multidisciplinary work, EHMI engages experts across diverse disciplines, sectors, backgrounds, and institutions. By bringing fields, EHMI harnesses existing knowledge to assess, prevent, adapt, and mitigate environmental health challenges, and identify critical, outstanding scientific questions.

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Multi-level Engagement

Multi-level engagement allows EHMI to build and sustain partnerships among interest groups and experts from the local to international levels. These partnerships pool expertise, resources, and experiences, and encourage collaboration and knowledge exchange while fostering collective decision-making that works for all. 

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Evidence Informed Science

Using evidence-informed science, EHMI’s experts analyze environmental health challenges, including the complex interplay between exposures and social determinants of health. They also help develop and guide on how to implement solutions to prevent and mitigate disease and disability, understanding that these factors often intersect and compound one another's impacts. 

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Our mission

The Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI) address complex environmental problems as an interconnected, multi-sectoral, multi-faceted system, with focus on the cumulative impacts from environmental stressors.  Our work has identified opportunities to better address Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure, held workshops to improve climate-related health disparities, and developed strategies to mitigate airborne disease risk.

Influential Leadership

Our diverse steering committee includes leaders in government, industry, academia, and nonprofit organizations to share ideas and form connections to inspire our work.  Steering committee members work together with a liaison group, comprised of representatives from sponsor organizations, federal agencies, and local community groups, and a National Academies’ staff group, to improve the health of all people through evidence-based assessment, prevention, adaptation, and strategic mitigation of complex environmental stressors that affect human health and disease over lifetimes. View committee below.

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Process

The EHMI holds periodic interest group discussions and workshops on critical and emerging issues in environmental health. These topics are identified through consultation with National Academies’ staff across all Divisions and Academies, Committee members, and liaisons. The EHMI also initiated an bi-annual foresight process to ensure that the committee is staying ahead of critical challenges in need of being addressed. Learn more about the National Academies' study process.

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Work with Us

We welcome experts from across a variety of disciplines, fields, and sectors to inform our work and ensure that we can bring the best possible science to help identify solutions for challenging environmental health problems.  Please contact us to learn more about how you can work with us.

ehmi@nas.edu
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Description

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.

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