It’s my pleasure to introduce you to INHERIT (INter-sectoral Health and Environment Research for InnovaTion) and to welcome you to this first newsletter. INHERIT is our new, ambitious, Horizon2020 research project (2016-2019) – a EuroHealthNet-led consortium of 18 well-established organisations with experts from a range of disciplines (public health, environment, economics, technology, social sciences, psychology, behaviour-change, sustainable consumption and media) from across Europe.
All partners are extremely committed to make a meaningful contribution to promote public health, health equity and reduce the ecological footprint. In particular, we are identifying how the factors that threaten the environment as well as our health can be modified through lifestyle changes. We will evaluate promising practices and policies, specifically in the areas of sustainable living, moving and consuming. We will add some fresh thinking around various themes: on health-promoting environments, environmental inequalities, sustainable food and waste, and distributional impacts of policy or interventions regarding active travel, housing, nutrition etc. Personalized e-coaching based on individual measurements and with use of technology and how this can help in particular disadvantaged people, who may initially be less likely to benefit from such technologies, may be one of the pilots to be tested later in the project. We are using various conceptual models for our thinking on these complex pathways and interrelated factors, which we will adapt for the purpose of INHERIT.
With INHERIT we aim to go beyond rhetoric and really apply a cross-sectoral HiAP (Health in All Policies) approach to address the intertwined concepts of health, lifestyles and environmental stressors. The evidence that INHERIT will contribute in all of these areas will advance efforts to develop the more coherent and systematic approaches required to reduce environmental degradation and health inequalities and to thereby sustain human life in good health. We aim to contribute to the health, climate and sustainable development debates in the EU and beyond, support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris Climate Change Agreements.
This is the first issue of a series of regular newsletters that INHERIT will produce for an external audience. The purpose is to showcase the progress we have made and to highlight some key developments (events, publications, policy matters) within the INHERIT themes.
Thanks for signing up and for becoming part of the INHERIT community! We invite you to see our team in action during the kick-off meeting in Brussels. Please do tell us what you think of our work and share your ideas via our website, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts! #InheritYourFuture