The Intersectoral Health and Environment Research for Innovation project, or INHERIT, is examining the health and environmental implications of our living, moving and consuming patterns.
INHERIT is an 18-partner, 4-year research programme bringing together experts from the health, environment and technology sectors.
The project will focus on factors that include housing, the built environment, travel, food, nutrition and eating habits. It will identify promising practices, test and evaluate pilot activities, roll-out models of good practice, evaluate them on cost effectiveness and support decision makers in efforts to strengthen wellbeing and environmental sustainability.
Current lifestyles and models of economic growth are damaging the environment and our health. Obesity is a growing problem across EU Member States and a recent report found that around 40,000 deaths in the UK per year are attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution.
INHERIT will investigate how to ensure environmental sustainability, improve health equity and wellbeing, and define how we can modify our lifestyles to protect both the environment and our health.
Dr Tim Taylor is co-leading on the project’s horizon scanning work and Dr Sahran Higgins will be contributing to a review of the evidence around key environmental stressors to health and approaches to address more environmentally sustainable behaviours in three areas; ‘moving’, ‘living’ and ‘consuming’. Both will be applying cost benefit analyses to selected interventions across Europe.
INHERIT is led by EurohealthNet and launched in January 2016. It will run until December 2019.
It receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 667364.