Priorities for research on environment, climate and health, a European perspective.

Climate change, urbanisation, chemical pollution and disruption of ecosystems, including biodiversity loss, affect our health and wellbeing. Research is crucial to be able to respond to the current and future challenges that are often complex and interconnected by nature. The HERA Agenda, summarised in this commentary, identifies six thematic research goals in the environment, climate and health fields. These include research to 1) reduce the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss on health and environment, 2) promote healthy lives in cities and communities, 3) eliminate harmful chemical exposures, 4) improve health impact assessment and implementation research, 5) develop infrastructures, technologies and human resources and 6) promote research on transformational change towards sustainability. Numerous specific recommendations for research topics, i.e., specific research goals, are presented under each major research goal. Several methods were used to define the priorities, including web-based surveys targeting researchers and stakeholder groups as well as a series of online and face-to-face workshops, involving hundreds of researchers and other stakeholders. The results call for an unprecedented effort to support a better understanding of the causes, interlinkages and impacts of environmental stressors on health and the environment. This will require breakdown of silos within policies, research, actors as well as in our institutional arrangements in order to enable more holistic approaches and solutions to emerge. The HERA project has developed a unique and exciting opportunity in Europe to consensuate priorities in research and strengthen research that has direct societal impact.

Getting out of crises: Environmental, social-ecological and evolutionary research is needed to avoid future risks of pandemics.

The implementation of One Health/EcoHealth/Planetary Health approaches has been identified as key (i) to address the strong interconnections between risk for pandemics, climate change and biodiversity loss and (ii) to develop and implement solutions to these interlinked crises. As a response to the multiple calls from scientists on that subject, we have here proposed seven long-term research questions regarding COVID-19 and emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) that are based on effective integration of environmental, ecological, evolutionary, and social sciences to better anticipate and mitigate EIDs. Research needs cover the social ecology of infectious disease agents, their evolution, the determinants of susceptibility of humans and animals to infections, and the human and ecological factors accelerating infectious disease emergence. For comprehensive investigation, they include the development of nature-based solutions to interlinked global planetary crises, addressing ethical and philosophical questions regarding the relationship of humans to nature and regarding transformative changes to safeguard the environment and human health. In support of this research, we propose the implementation of innovative multidisciplinary facilities embedded in social ecosystems locally: ecological health observatories and living laboratories. This work was carried out in the frame of the European Community project HERA (www.HERAresearchEU.eu), which aims to set priorities for an environment, climate and health research agenda in the European Union by adopting a systemic approach in the face of global environmental change.