Ireland's State of the Environment Report 2024

395 Chapter 14: Environment, Health and Wellbeing 6. Conclusions Our environment plays a crucial role as a determinant of our health. A good-quality environment providing clean air, clean water and productive soils will provide positive benefits for human and animal health. Conversely, a poor environment will negatively impact human and animal health. Reducing pollution, adapting to and mitigating climate impacts, and restoring ecosystems can have enormous benefits for our health and wellbeing. Healthier populations are also more resilient to climate impacts such as heatwaves. The impact of environmental hazards and exposure is not equal across society, with vulnerable population groups, such as young and elderly people and those in disadvantaged communities, often being affected to a much greater extent than others. Efforts to assess and understand inequalities in exposure and in impact at a finer geographical scale in Ireland should be prioritised to allow us to assess how the inequality gap is changing over time. Improving environmental quality can create healthier places for all members of society, regardless of age, socio-economic status and region. Health-centred spatial planning is also vital to enhance environmental quality and create connected and accessible spaces for people across all life stages. Healthy urban places can enable citizens to make more sustainable choices, live healthier lives and reduce hazardous environmental exposures they may be subject to. While applied research and the continued collection and analysis of data are required to gain new knowledge and evidence, we already have enough knowledge and evidence in certain domains to allow us to take action against some of the most preventable environmental risks. We must prioritise and tackle those environmental hazards that we know are detrimentally affecting our health. For example, to better safeguard the public from exposure to the carcinogenic radioactive gas radon, which is causing approximately 350 new cases of lung cancer each year, we must shift our focus towards primary prevention measures in all new buildings in all parts of the country, irrespective of their radon risk designation. We are also acutely aware of the direct impacts of poor air quality on morbidity and mortality. We must plan for and take more immediate action in the short to medium term to accelerate achieving the WHO guideline limits included in the Clean Air Strategy. Further targeted policy measures will be required to ensure that improvements in air quality benefit those who are most exposed and/or most vulnerable to its effects. Similarly, a national noise policy statement and noise planning guidance are needed now more than ever to tackle the human health impacts of noise pollution. We have been aware of issues related to water quality for many years, particularly with regard to private drinking water supplies, which consistently underperform in quality compared with public supplies. Similarly, failure to fix faulty septic tanks is causing unnecessary risks to human health and the environment. Our changing climate will further compound already significant risks to human health, including those posed by infectious diseases. The persistence of many of these well-recognised issues and lack of meaningful progress on many indicates that our current approach to tackling these issues is not having the desired effect and points to a need to re-examine and step up our approach to many. The right choice for society needs to be the easy choice. However, what might work for one sector of society may not work for another, meaning that we need to expand and tailor a suite of supportive interventions in policy areas, paying particular attention to those more vulnerable members of society for whom environmental inequalities are most evident. Enhancing the coherence between policies on population health, climate change and environmental quality, and recognising that multiple policy areas, from welfare to urban design, can help to reduce vulnerability and exposure to environmental health hazards, will be key. The Healthy Ireland Outcomes Framework, along with the WBF for Ireland, provide important national information by which progress in reducing inequalities in environmental exposure can be monitored. This work could be strengthened further by recognising the health implications of relevant environmental policies and implementing monitoring and evaluation of associated health outcomes and impacts on an ongoing basis. Practices and choices in society are often driven by emerging areas of policy. It is essential that policy across all domains carefully considers measures in the context of our environment, our health and wellbeing, and health equity to ensure that there are synergistic outcomes and to avoid unintended consequences. For example, national retrofitting targets hope to bring us closer to becoming a sustainable, low-carbon and energy-efficient economy and society by retrofitting a substantial portion of our current building stock by 2030. In aiming to make our housing stock warmer and more comfortable while reducing energy demand and emissions, we must also ensure that ventilation is carefully considered to avoid any increase in concentrations of indoor pollutants and hazards, particularly radon gas. As recognised at the beginning of the chapter, primary prevention is key if we want to see a reduction in the levels of disease and early death from harmful environmental exposures in our population. We know the issues and we know that they are modifiable, so it is now time to tackle them in a meaningful way to effect change. Addressing these risks means that people can be healthier and live longer. Creating healthy places free from environmental hazards is key to creating a healthier and fairer society in which everyone can thrive.