Sustainable Healthy Urban Environments (SHUE) project (360G-Wellcome-103908_Z_14_A)

The environments and governance of cities have an important role in influencing the exposures and health-related behaviours of their populations. Cities also have a demand for resources beyond current limits of sustainability. The changes needed to help reduce these local and global environmental impacts offer opportunities for improving population health by reducing current unhealthy exposures and behaviours which also contribute to patterns of unsustainable living. However, as yet there is only patchy empirical evidence on the degree to which city characteristics are associated with variations in health-related exposures, behaviours and outcomes as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This project will build up a detailed database of a globally-distributed selected sample of cities and their populations with the aim of identifying the inter-relationship between city characteristics, their use of energy and other resources, and health-related behaviours and exposures. From comparative analyses combined with health modelling, we will assess the potential impact on health of realistic options for more sustainable strategies in such areas as transport policy and infrastructure, aiming to identify examples and principles to promote health and sustainability that can be more widely applied. The resulting database will be an open access resource for the research community and can be expanded over time.