Evaluating Non-Chemical Stressors for Children’s Environmental Health Protection: Workshop Summary
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) recognized the need to develop an approach to study non-chemical stressors within a chemical stressor paradigm. Research is needed to identify which non-chemical stressors are likely to be most relevant, how these non-chemical stressors vary throughout the lifecourse, and how non-chemical stressors interact with chemical stressors and with other non-chemical stressors. Researchers in the Sustainable and Healthy Communities (SHC) National Research Program were asked to design and hold a workshop to identify key non-chemical stressors, understand the importance of non-chemical stressors within the chemical paradigm, and consider how chemical and non-chemical stressors should be combined for analysis. The workshop participants considered holistic decisions on community health relevant to children, and used the Total Environment framework as an organizing construct.
The workshop planning committee was comprised of ORD researchers from both the SHC and the Air, Climate and Energy (ACE) National Research Programs who were actively working to incorporate non-chemical stressors into their research portfolios. Workshop participants were comprised of experts from academia, non-profit organizations, and government. The workshop included two keynote presentations – first, an overview of EPA research on non-chemical stressors, and second, an overview of academic research on non-chemical stressors – as well as a series of subject specific presentations, including non-chemical stressors and the built environment, natural environment, and social environment and stressors, and health and well-being. In addition to the presentations, there were a series of facilitated breakout sessions to allow for more detailed discussions among workshop participants.
This report summarizes the two-day virtual workshop wholly devoted to non-chemical stressors within a chemical stressor paradigm.
This workshop showed that non-chemical stressors from the built, natural, and social environments are interrelated and influence each other suggesting the challenge of selecting the most appropriate non-chemical stressors for research within the chemical stressor paradigm. Non-chemical stressors from the social environment are inextricably linked to non-chemical stressors from the built and natural environments. This workshop stressed the importance of understanding these interrelationships and appropriately incorporating multiple non-chemical stressors into the chemical stressor paradigm. Many non-chemical stressors co-occur and there are many combinations of non-chemical stressors depending on the research question. This workshop identified four of the most important as being geography (e.g., scale, attributes of places, spatial patterns of phenomena, and interactions among these), neighborhood environment and characteristics, housing stock, and racism.
This report is organized into three sections: Session Summaries, Summaries of Breakout Sessions, and Key Takeaways from the Breakout Sessions. The agenda (Appendix A), participant list (Appendix B), and presentations (Appendix C) are also included as supporting materials.