Buse Chris G
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Can J Public Health. 2025 Feb;116(1):136-139. doi: 10.17269/s41997-024-00954-x. Epub 2024 Sep 30.
The 2021 federal budget committed funding to a co-sponsored Statistics Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada initiative aimed at conducting a 'census' of Canadian environments. The goal of the Census of Environment (CoE) is "to deliver a full picture of the complex relationship between ecosystems and the economy, society, and human well-being", with obvious implications for the ongoing monitoring and surveillance of environmental influence on human health. This commentary reflects on the evolution of the CoE initiative in describing two opportunities for population and public health researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers in engaging with the CoE and its data. First, it describes stated CoE commitments to enhancing access to complex environmental data and the provision of data processing to support novel analyses and data utilization. Second, it highlights the relative importance of disaggregating environmental data across a variety of bio-geographical scales to engender a holistic understanding of the health of multiple elements that comprise living systems, including consideration of environmental health equity and intersectoral action. It ends with a constructive critique of the CoE's framing of 'ecosystem accounting' to support its maturation, and advocates for public health involvement in centring the importance of health in this initiative into the future.
2021年联邦预算承诺为加拿大统计局和加拿大环境与气候变化部共同发起的一项倡议提供资金，该倡议旨在对加拿大的环境进行一次“普查”。环境普查（CoE）的目标是“全面呈现生态系统与经济、社会和人类福祉之间的复杂关系”，这对持续监测和监督环境对人类健康的影响具有明显意义。本评论文章通过描述人口与公共卫生研究人员、从业者和政策制定者参与环境普查及其数据的两个机会，反思了环境普查倡议的发展历程。第一，文章阐述了环境普查在增强获取复杂环境数据的机会以及提供数据处理以支持新颖分析和数据利用方面的既定承诺。第二，文章强调了在各种生物地理尺度上对环境数据进行分类的相对重要性，以便对构成生命系统的多个要素的健康状况形成全面理解，包括考虑环境健康公平性和跨部门行动。文章最后对环境普查为支持其成熟而构建的“生态系统核算”框架提出了建设性批评，并倡导公共卫生领域参与其中，以便在未来将健康的重要性置于该倡议的核心位置。
