Abstract
The Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH) project is a global research programme on the complex systemic connections between urban development and health. Through transdisciplinary methods it will develop critical evidence on how to achieve the far-reaching transformation of cities needed to address vital environmental imperatives for planetary health in the 21st century. CUSSH’s core components include: (i) a review of evidence on the effects of climate actions (both mitigation and adaptation) and factors influencing their implementation in urban settings; (ii) the development and application of methods for tracking the progress of cities towards sustainability and health goals; (iii) the development and application of models to assess the impact on population health, health inequalities, socio-economic development and environmental parameters of urban development strategies, in order to support policy decisions; (iv) iterative in-depth engagements with stakeholders in partner cities in low-, middle- and high-income settings, using systems-based participatory methods, to test and support the implementation of the transformative changes needed to meet local and global health and sustainability objectives; (v) a programme of public engagement and capacity building. Through these steps, the programme will provide transferable evidence on how to accelerate actions essential to achieving population-level health and global climate goals through, amongst others, changing cities’ energy provision, transport infrastructure, green infrastructure, air quality, waste management and housing.
Highlights
By almost any objective measure, success to date in meeting key environmental and associated health challenges in cities around the world has, at best, been limited
Evidence generation Evidence generation has three components: (i) The assembly of evidence from published literature on challenges and associated interventions for urban health and sustainability as a resource to help inform policy development. This includes (1) a literature review of healthy sustainable urban development and the factors that promote or impede its realisation, brought together as a concepts review; (2) the assembly and analysis of a global database of published peer-reviewed studies on implemented city interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation relevant to health and wellbeing, to further examine specific questions relating to the impact and effectiveness of potential solutions, including those relating to behaviour change, infrastructure development and technological innovation, as well as exploring factors that have influenced the implementation of such solutions; and (3) the development of a classification of urban interventions for sustainability and health which will be analysed with respect to their potential impact at population scale on both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and health outcomes
Indicators track progress on (1) environmental exposures and their associated health impacts, and (2) the engagement processes between the research team and city stakeholders as a measure of the interactions and impact of Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH) activities. The latter are aimed at supporting the evaluation of the influence of CUSSH initiatives with decisionmakers and have the nature of a chronology of interactions and changing perspectives
Summary
Transformational change towards health and sustainability [version 1; peer review: 1 approved, 1 approved with reservations].
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