Global Initiative on Children's Environmental Health Indicators
A Global Initiative on Children’s Environmental Health Indicators was launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002. This represents an independent effort that contributes to achieving the objectives of the Healthy Environments for Children Alliance, in particular to inform and influence policy-makers and to judge the effectiveness of programmes to improve children’s environmental health.
The objectives of the Global Initiative are to:
- Develop and promote use of children's environmental health indicators
- Improve assessment of ehildren's environmental health and monitor the success or failure of interventions
- Facilitate the ability of policy-makers to improve environmental conditions for children
The implementation of this Initiative is lead by the World Health Organization. It builds on existing international, regional and national work on child health and environmental indicators by initiating a series of regional pilots to develop, collect and report children’s environmental health indicators. The Initiative aims to ensure equal relevance of the indicators for the health and environment sectors so that both can monitor their efforts towards realizing healthy environments for healthy children.
We encourage a “flexible approach”: Flexible with respect to regional pilots choosing for themselves which approach they would like to follow in collecting and reporting indicators. And flexible by starting off with a feasible, low-cost approach that maximizes the use of existing data and indicators and works towards a more harmonized and complete assessment of the state of children’s environmental health in the longer term.
More information
LIST OF PARTNERS
Governments
International organizations
- Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC)
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
- World Health Organization (WHO)
Non governmental organizations
- International Network on Children's Health, Environment and Safety (INCHES)
- International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE)
- Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)