Opportunities for Urban Environmental Health and Sustainability: HEALTHY POLIS Keith Dear 1 and Sotiris Vardoulakis 2 1 Australian National University 2 Public Health England INTRODUCTION A NEW CONSORTIUM : Healthy Polis Rapid urbanisation, especially in the Asian-Pacific region, is stretching natural resources and threatening environmental quality. Similarly, densely populated urban areas in Europe are facing environmental health challenges including contamination of air, water and soil. Sprawling urban areas worldwide contribute to traffic congestion, with associated air pollution and long commuting times affecting public health and productivity. Environmental health challenges in cities Cities are complex systems that demand systems-based, interdisciplinary research methods involving epidemiologists, toxicologists, urban planners, environmental and public health scientists. Methodological innovation and standardisation of epidemiological and risk assessment methods across countries, are needed to address complex environmental health challenges in the context of climate change and sustainable development. Environmental health projects require data acquisition and processing steps before analysis can begin, often relying on intricate computing scripts. Kepler allows us to create and maintain workflows that link such steps in a readable, step- by-step flowchart, avoiding the need for high-level programming knowledge. Our project SWISH* is adding specialised tools for environmental epidemiology to Kepler. Benefits of using a scientific workflow include: Documentation is integrated with analysis Can incorporate existing published procedures and statistical analyses, e.g. from R or Stata Scheduled updates of data from external sources can be automated Scientific workflows are easy to share / modify / update / extend. * S cientific W orkflow & I ntegration S oftware for H ealth DISCUSSION Acknowledgements The SWISH project uses Kepler (kepler-project.org), and is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) which is funded by the Australian Government. Example: Scientific Workflow Systems Healthy Polis is a new global urban environmental health consortium. AIMS 1.Promote innovation and standardisation in research methods 2.Facilitate international, multi- disciplinary research collaborations 3.Provide training and promote capacity building especially in rapidly urbanizing countries 4.Evaluate and promote environmental interventions to improve public health in cities. Further details can be found at Institutions, departments and individual scientists are invited to join Healthy Polis. Please send expressions of interest to The new international consortium Healthy Polis aims to protect public health by promoting multi- disciplinary, policy-relevant research on urban environmental health and sustainability, improving methodologies for health risk assessment, facilitating international collaboration (including standardisation of research methods), contributing to the training of scientists and students, and engaging with Governments, local authorities, organisations such as WHO and WMO, industry and academia. ordinated between (a) the UK and rest of Europe, and (b) China, Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region. A major focus of the con- sortium will be on promoting and supporting international research projects co-