Environmental Health Issues in Contemporary Southeast Asia

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Maintaining a healthy environment is central to increasing quality of life, in contrast poor environmental quality has its greatest impact on people whose health status is already at risk. In most instances, most people may not be fully aware of how environmental factors directly and indirectly affected their overall health.
In response to these challenges, a compendium of studies in relation to the environment-health nexus have been generated over recent years to aid policymakers in crafting evidence-informed policies. This global movement has been mostly centered in the Western continents as well as in South- and East- Asian countries, with scarce evidence from the Southeast Asian (SEA) region. SEA has been identified as one of the regions which would be largely impacted by climate change and has been facing several environmental health issues to date.
SEA has experienced massive economic and population growth in the last decades. This growth has led to an increase in demand for food, water, sewage/waste disposal, and energy. Unfortunately, these demands are quickly consuming the natural resources and trading off the environmental quality of countries in the region. With this array of environmental challenges, health will be one of the few direct human dimensions whereby there is apparent and substantial negative impact. It is important that we understand the underlying mechanisms and the subsequent risks associated with the environmental exposures, and at the same time package such results/information towards policy-relevant inputs.
The increasing complexity in documenting these environmental health issues poses a challenge in measuring the true extent of the problem. Progress has been made so far, whereby the various scientific communities have since acknowledged the need to work alongside various disciplines, tackling these issues from a multidisciplinary vantage point.
This Research Topic intends to build upon the scarce evidence in the region with the aim to elucidate these environmental health issues, hoping that it can provide scientific/non-scientific stakeholders an overview of the extent of these problems.
The current call for submission includes but is not limited to the following topics: ● Climate change and health; ● Air pollution (indoor, outdoor, and transboundary); ● Toxicology and health; ● Water and Health; ● One health approach and COVID- 19; ● Occupational health; ● Planetary Health.
We welcome authors to submit a wide-range of article types to the current call, which includes Original Research, Reviews, Case Studies, and Brief Research Reports.

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Keywords: climate change, pollution, one health, toxicology, water and health, urban heat island, planetary health

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