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Healthy
Environments for Children Alliance (HECA)
UNEP
is a core partner in the WHO-led‘Healthy
Environments for Children Alliance’
(HECA). HECA, as outlined in its mission statement, is a
“world-wide alliance to reduce environmental risks to
children’s
health that arise from the settings where they live, learn, play, and
sometimes work, by providing knowledge, increasing political will,
mobilizing resources, and catalysing intense and urgent
action”
The
New York Office (NYO) is UNEP’s focal point for HECA. It
played an
active role on HECA’s initial ‘Alliance-Building
Task Force’
and three of its working groups - structure and governance, priority
areas of work, and advocacy and information; and helped to develop
its framework
for action. The UNEP/NYO
also supported the selection of HECA country
projects and provided
substantive input and
support to the WHO-led HECA Secretariat, including reviewing issue
briefs.
HECAnet
From
June 2004 to March
2006, UNEP was responsible for the
production of HECAnet,
an electronic newsletter that provides updates on
the activities of HECA and its members, as well as an
extensive
overview of media coverage of children’s environmental health
issues and relevant meetings, research findings and information and
advocacy resources. HECANET is sent monthly to an international list
of approximately 1000 subscribers. UNEP has now transferred the lead
role in preparing HECANET to WHO, although it will continue to be a
joint effort of both organizations.
Health
and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI)
WHO
and UNEP joined forces at WSSD to launch the Health
and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI),
sponsored by Canada and supported by US/EPA. HELI is a
global
effort by the two organizations to promote and facilitate action in
developing countries to reduce environmental threats to human health,
in support of sustainable development objectives. HELI's
mission is the facilitation of better access at country level to
existing knowledge, tools and methods for making good environment and
health policy decisions. HELI also looks at vulnerable sectors of the
population, including children. HELI is in contact with those in
charge of the technical activities in WHO in order to incorporate
capacity-building components into their pilots. These activities will
aim at training health care providers on the recognition of pediatric
diseases linked to the environment and at promoting the collection,
recording and reporting of environmental case data. There are plans
to discuss activities that address the community and children
themselves (e.g. school education).
HELI supports a more
coherent approach to valuing the services that ecosystems provide to
human health as part of decision- making processes. Activities
include: pilot projects in Jordan, Uganda
and Thailand that bring together diverse
government
and civil society
sectors to assess and recommend integrated policies on environment
and health issues; guidance on better use of impact assessment and
economic valuation to enhance environment and health decision -
making; improving access to policy- relevant knowledge, resources,
and tools, via electronic media and printed materials, in priority
areas (such as water quality, availability and sanitation; water -
related vector - borne diseases; ambient and indoor air quality;
toxic substances; and global environmental change); and capacity
building for policy action at local, national and regional levels
through technical workshops and interactive events including
policy-makers, scientists and the public.
Children’s
Environmental Health Indicators (CEHI)
UNEP is a core
founding
partner in the WHO-led global partnership initiative on children’s
environmental health indicators (CEHI),
launched at
WSSD. As background to the initaitive,
UNEP was
involved in the development of a brochure launched at WSSD entitled, “A
Call to Action: Using Indicators to Measure Progress on
Children’s
Environmental Health”.
CEHI
contributes to achieving the objectives of HECA, in particular to
inform and influence policy-makers and to judge the effectiveness of
programmes to improve children’s environmental health.
CEHI’s
objectives are to: (i) develop and promote use of children's
environmental health indicators; (ii) improve assessment of
children's environmental health and monitor the success or failure of
interventions; (iii) facilitate the ability of policy-makers to
improve environmental conditions for children. CEHI 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.
CEHI is conducting regional indicator
pilot projects
in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and
North America. WHO
coordinates this work with numberous partners, including
nongovernmental organizations, governmnets and international
organizations, building on already-existing information and exploring
opportunities for the
collection of new data. As part of this initiative, regions and
individual
countries develop their own set of indicators most appropriate to the
national
health and environmental conditions. Based on these priorities,
countries
initiate a system of collecting indicators and reporting on the state
of
children's enviornmental health.
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