Abstract
Waste and materials management, land use planning, transportation and infrastructure including water and energy can have indirect or direct beneficial impacts on the environment and public health. The potential for impact, however, is rarely viewed in an integrated fashion. To facilitate such an integrated view in support of community-based policy decision making, we catalogued and evaluated associations between common, publically available, Environmental (e), Health (h), and Sustainability (s) metrics and sociodemographic measurements (n = 10) for 50 populous U.S. cities. E, H, S indices combined from two sources were derived from component (e) (h) (s) metrics for each city. A composite EHS Index was derived to reflect the integration across the E, H, and S indices. Rank order of high performing cities was highly dependent on the E, H and S indices considered. When viewed together with sociodemographic measurements, our analyses further the understanding of the interplay between these broad categories and reveal significant sociodemographic disparities (e.g., race, education, income) associated with low performing cities. Our analyses demonstrate how publically available environmental, health, sustainability and socioeconomic data sets can be used to better understand interconnections between these diverse domains for more holistic community assessments.
Highlights
The mission of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment
We propose a benchmarking approach to allow cities to compare and rate their performance based on a broad array of environmental and sustainability and health metrics, many recommended by the WHO European Healthy Cities Network (WHO-EHCN) [24]
The integrated data analyses presented here include over 65 measures across broad environment, health, and sustainability and socioeconomics categories
Summary
The mission of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment. The EPA has focused its regulatory and research activities on environmental exposures to air, water, toxic wastes and associated ecological and health impacts. EPA, recognizing the importance of incorporating sustainability into decision making, is working to formally adopt a sustainability paradigm that would underlie agency policies and programs [1]. In recognition of the interdependency between long term infrastructure planning and the potential impact on the health and wellbeing of communities, EPA has joined the Partnership for Sustainable. Communities with the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S
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