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Introducing the field of Environ-Mental Health

Why now?

 

Throughout our lives, the environments we inhabit – from our homes and schools to workplaces, digital spaces, and urban landscapes – profoundly shape our experiences and influence our health. These environments expose us to a variety of risks, including urban living, air pollution, climate change, workplace digital-screen hazards, and economic deprivation. Together, these environmental exposures have a powerful impact on brain health, mental health, and overall wellbeing. In fact, over half of the risks to our mental health stem from the spaces we live in and the challenges they present. The global costs of these issues are immense, with estimates reaching £37 billion annually by 2030 and £421 billion by 2050.

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Addressing these interconnected challenges requires a new approach – a field we call environ-mental health. This emerging field brings together insights from diverse areas of expertise to create a holistic understanding of how environments affect mental and brain health, while also identifying strategies to improve wellbeing.

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Integrating Key Environmental Fields

Environ-mental health builds on the strengths of several important disciplines, combining their unique perspectives to create something greater than the sum of its parts:

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  • Environmental Sciences: Focuses on modelling environmental risks and their impact on mental health, using advanced tools to study factors like air and water quality, climate change, and deprivation. This field helps identify and predict how environmental stressors contribute to mental health challenges, providing critical data for developing interventions and shaping policies that promote healthier, more resilient communities.

  • Environmental Health: Rooted in a public health framework, this field focuses on understanding and mitigating how exposure to harmful environmental factors – such as pollutants, toxins, and hazardous materials – affects human health. Its strength lies in prevention, policymaking, and interventions aimed at reducing health disparities related to environmental risks.

  • Environmental Psychology: Explores how our psychological relationship with the environment impacts mental health and behaviour. This includes the mental health impacts of eco-anxiety – the chronic worry about climate change and environmental destruction – as well as climate denial, where individuals psychologically reject environmental crises. Environmental psychology also investigates how healthy behaviours, like exercise and diet, are influenced by access to green spaces, urban design, and digital environments. Additionally, it studies workplace stress and resilience, focusing on how physical and social work environments shape wellbeing and productivity.

  • Environmental Neuroscience: A growing area of study that investigates how environments shape brain function, structure, and development. This field explores how exposure to factors like noise pollution, green spaces, or urbanicity influences cognitive functioning, mental health, and brain resilience across the lifespan.

  • Exposomics: This field focuses on the totality of exposures we experience throughout our lives – from chemical and physical factors to social and psychological influences. Distinct from genomics, which studies inherited biological factors, exposomics examines how external exposures interact with our bodies to shape health outcomes. It uses methods like biomonitoring, environmental sampling, wearable technology, and advanced computational techniques to map and quantify the "exposome," the sum of all exposures over a lifetime.

  • Environmental Humanities: Investigates how cultural, historical, and ethical connections to the environment shape our understanding of health and wellbeing. It incorporates the arts, storytelling, and lived experiences to bring personal and communal dimensions to environmental issues. By weaving together creative expression and reflective practice, the environmental humanities provide an important lens for understanding how environments, including digital spaces, affect mental and emotional wellbeing.

 

By combining these fields, environ-mental health offers a comprehensive lens to address how environmental risks influence mental and brain health.

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A Holistic Framework for Understanding and Action

While environ-mental health seeks to integrate these fields, it also advances a common vocabulary and theoretical framework. This makes the field more than just an umbrella concept; it represents a truly disruptive and transformative area of study. By fostering transdisciplinary thinking, it moves beyond disciplinary silos to create a unified approach to addressing environmental and mental health challenges.

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This unified approach is grounded in an innovative framework that incorporates several key principles:

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  • Lived Experience: Recognising the value of individual and community voices in understanding how environmental challenges affect mental health. Lived experience is essential for understanding how people navigate daily life in environments where they are at risk of exposure to harmful factors. This is particularly true for vulnerable populations – those facing inequalities, economic deprivation, or systemic disadvantages. People in these situations often experience the cumulative impact of multiple risks, from poor housing and polluted neighbourhoods to limited access to healthcare and the stresses of navigating digital inequalities. Including their perspectives ensures that solutions address real-world challenges and prioritise those most at risk.

  • Life-Course Approach: Acknowledging that the environments we encounter throughout different stages of life – from childhood to old age – have cumulative effects on mental and brain health. Key stages in cognitive and mental health development, such as early childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, are particularly sensitive to environmental exposures like air pollution, toxins, and stress. Similarly, in later life, as people age and become more physically and mentally vulnerable, exposures to poor environments can significantly exacerbate health risks. Addressing these critical periods is essential for improving health outcomes across the lifespan.

  • Social Complexity Thinking: Understanding mental and brain health as deeply embedded in the dynamic and interconnected relationships of our social and environmental systems. People live within systems where change is non-linear, and small shifts can lead to unexpected, emergent outcomes. Health outcomes are shaped by multiple trajectories that unfold over time, influenced by factors like social networks, cultural practices, economic systems, and environmental challenges. Recognising these complexities enables more adaptive and holistic solutions.

  • Place-Based Research: Recognising that where we live matters. Local factors like neighbourhood design, air quality, and access to green spaces play a critical role in shaping mental health outcomes. Place-based research also highlights how entrenched inequalities, such as poverty and inadequate housing, can exacerbate risks, while healthy spaces are vital for fostering Healthy Minds. Understanding the wider determinants of mental health—like education, employment, and community infrastructure—is essential for creating environments that promote resilience and wellbeing.

  • Integrating Mental Health, Brain Health, and Wellbeing: Uniting these interconnected aspects under a shared framework we call Healthy Minds. This principle focuses on holistic approaches to promoting resilience and flourishing by addressing the biological, psychological, and social dimensions of mental health.

  • Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Addressing global problems requires collaboration across fields, cultures, and contexts. Environmental challenges and their solutions vary across different socioeconomic and cultural settings. For example, urban air pollution may demand one type of intervention in low-income areas of rapidly growing cities and another in rural regions facing economic decline. Transdisciplinary collaboration ensures that solutions are informed by diverse perspectives, global realities, and locally tailored approaches.

  • Interdisciplinary Methods Platforms: Environ-mental health relies on cutting-edge research tools and methodologies. This includes the latest in computational methods, language models, digital techniques, and qualitative methods that capture the richness of lived experiences. By combining innovative tools with traditional approaches, researchers can better understand the complex relationships between environmental risks and health outcomes.

 

Why Environ-Mental Health Matters

This new field isn’t just about research – it’s about creating real-world change. By addressing the connections between environment, mental health, and brain health, environ-mental health can drive more effective policies and practices. Its approaches offer new ways to evaluate policies, helping policymakers understand how environmental risks affect mental health outcomes in the long term. This ensures that interventions are grounded in evidence, focus on lived experiences, and adapt to the complexities of real-world settings.

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By integrating research into practice, environ-mental health supports the development of strategies that are not only innovative but also practical and scalable. These strategies can guide governments, organisations, and communities to design healthier environments, reduce risks, and enhance resilience.

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Together, through the lens of environ-mental health, we can better understand the challenges of our changing world and take action to build healthier, more sustainable futures for everyone.

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Faculty of Social Sciences, Arthur Holmes Building, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

© 2025 by Brian Castellani.

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