Environment Related Human Disease Indicators: Contribution to State of the Environment Reporting

Since the release of Australia's first State of the Environment (SoE) report, a variety of physical environmental indicators have been determined for each SoE environmental management theme (the atmosphere, water {inland, estuarine and sea}, the land, biodiversity, heritage and human settlement). While monitoring these physical themes is fundamental to environmental protection, there are opportunities to expand SoE reporting within the broader context of sustainable development. Indicators of social welfare, equity and human health all have environmental components, both in terms of cause and effect. This has been recognised in the 1999 National Environmental Health Strategy which recommends the identification of indicators of environmental hazard, human health outcomes and environmental management processes to ameliorate these. Illustrating the effects of environmental degradation in terms of human health can increase community awareness of the relevance of environmental management or protection approaches. This article attempts to define a preliminary set of population health environmental indicators (PHEIs) that could be incorporated into SoE indicator sets. Such human health indicators can be used both as measures of environmental quality, as well as to illustrate how environmental degradation impacts on human health and quality of life. All indicators are developed from routinely collected health data sources to enable trend monitoring. Some examples are given of typical PHEIs produced for use within a NSW regional area.