Environmental Policies: Evaluating Existing Measures and Informing New Actions

Many environmental stressors have well-established links with adverse health outcomes, which calls for research that moves beyond documenting harm toward facilitating action. The successful removal of lead from paint and gasoline demonstrate that science-informed policies can protect public health, yet the process of science-to-action often remains slow and uneven across environmental stressors and countries. Differences in environmental policies by countries further complicate the issue, as environmental stressors can cross borders and the communities at elevated risk of high exposure are often the least equipped with resources or data needed to design, implement, and evaluate environmental policies. This collection seeks to inform policymakers and researchers with actionable evidence, emerging challenges, and shaping priorities at the intersection of environmental policies and public health.This Research Topic aims to stimulate and assemble cutting-edge environmental health research that facilitates science to action. A growing body of work has demonstrated measurable reductions in air, water, and soil contamination in response to environmental policies, and applied methodologies such as natural experiments, difference-in-differences, and g-computation to evaluate and inform environmental policies. We welcome studies that assess policy effectiveness in terms of relevant exposure reduction or population health improvements, identify effective points of intervention by comparatively estimating health benefits across multiple scenarios of hypothetical interventions to promote new policies, or develop innovative methodologies to evaluate policy effectiveness.We invite submissions that explore environmental policies across, but not limited to, the following themes:* Assessment of policy effectiveness in preventing or reducing population exposure to environmental stressor(s)* Estimation of direct and indirect health benefits attributable to environmental policy* Review of environmental policies by countries/regions, environmental medium (e.g, air, water, soil), or by target population (e.g., nation-wide, targeted for sub-populations at high risk of exposure)* Comparing environmental policies at local, national, or international* Methodological innovations and challenges in evaluating policy effectiveness* Consideration of multiple environmental stressors or cumulative exposures in environmental policies* Unintended consequences (e.g., regrettable substitution) and co-benefits of environmental policies* Studies of successful interventions, approaches to scale-up, or to improve transportability of research findingsAppendix: We welcome a range of article types, including original research, review articles, policy analyses, case studies, and short communications. Topic editors: Giehae Choi Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79695/environmental-policies-evaluating-existing-measures-and-informing-new-actions