The One Health framework recognises a fundamental truth: human health, animal health, and environmental health are inseparable. Understanding our environment is the key to predicting and preventing emerging health crises affecting all Australians. On 3 December 2025, three distinguished speakers joined TERN’s bimonthly webinar series to discuss the unprecedented challenges emerging at the intersection of environmental change and human health. With a wealth of experience analysing long-term data sets to explore how environmental hazards impact human health, the speakers shared some of the key considerations in this space, from ensuring data streams and complex models are accessible and reliable to the challenge of sharing information in such a way that it raises the alarm and guides action where needed.
Our first speaker Associate Professor Ivan Hannigan of Curtin University directs the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Climate Change and Health Impact Assessment and leads the data and decision support theme of the HEAL National Research Network. In his talk The Climate Change Health Impact Assessment (CCHIA) Framework: Projecting Future Risks and Guiding Action, he discussed his work disentangling the health effects of environmental changes from social factors, studying phenomena from bush fire smoke impacts on heart disease to droughts effect on mental health.
Ivan began by explaining that the direct physiological impacts of climate change – such as severe dehydration or heat stroke — are important but comprise only a small part of the overall health burden of climate change.
To highlight the many and varied indirect health impacts, Ivan asked us to consider how bushfire smoke causes respiratory illnesses or how changes in plant, animal and human interactions are leading to a rise in zoonoses and increased risk of spillover into human populations. If we zoom out further, we see how extreme weather reduces food security, which increases the risk of widespread malnutrition and food-borne diseases. He also emphasised the impacts on psychosocial health, such as a rise in depression and self-harm in those whose livelihoods and social harmony are being upended by a changing climate.
Ivan explained that as the health impacts of climate change become more indirect, the pathways between cause and effect become more convoluted and complex. He also noted that many of the indirect health impacts are mediated through ecosystems in some way or another, so if we want to understand them, it’s crucial to integrate health data with large ecological datasets.
Ivan described his development of a health impact assessment framework that seeks to do just this. It provides a way to look at environmental health hazards at a large, interconnected system level. Moreover, its modular design provides a way to drill down into specific small-scale areas when needed. The framework will be published in May 2026 and will help researchers calculate the burden of disease attributable to certain exposures or systemic processes. Those health burdens can be projected into the future to generate a variety of ‘what if’ scenarios that can guide interventions.
In addition to sharing a compelling case study how this approach was used to analyse and create projections for an urban heat island, Ivan also highlighted the importance of effective communication of research outcomes to ensure research leads to action.
Our next speaker was Professor Jochen Mueller, an Australian Laureate Fellow who is leading a team in exposure science at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS) at the University of Queensland.
In his talk, Emerging ‘hazards’ a potential unknown when forecasting health issues, Jochen discussed the role chemical contaminants play in pushing our planet beyond safe environmental limits. He also explained the importance of developing innovative approaches for assessing community exposure to environmental stressors.
Jochen began by highlighting how chemical pollution is a key driver of many of our major environmental crises, including climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, and even habitat degradation. After all, carbon dioxide, methane and CFCs are all chemicals, as are pesticides and fertilisers in agricultural run-off.
As planetary boundary models increasingly recognise the risks posed by chemicals, it is also becoming clear that many of the top causes of death — from cardiovascular disease and various cancers — are associated with exposure to environmental hazards. Jochen emphasised that the primary risk comes from chemicals with delayed or indirect effects and we currently have no capacity to systematically assess, monitor and manage them before they cause harm.
To address this, he and his colleagues at QAEHS are advancing our understanding of the ‘exposome’, which involves investigating the chemicals we’re exposed to in our environment, how they interact with our genomes and what effects these interactions have over time. This research includes tracking real-world exposures through long-term human biomonitoring, which includes the collection and storage of human urine and breastmilk samples over multiple decades. It also involves long-term monitoring of wastewater, air, and soil. Such initiatives can reveal community level exposures to a wide range of contaminants from phthalates to polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and can also reveal trends in the use of use of tobacco, e-cigarettes, alcohol and illicit drugs.
The collective aim of these programs is to function as an alarm system, said Jochen. The ability to identify emerging risks can prompt regulatory action to limit our exposure to harmful chemicals and can also help monitor the effectiveness of policies put in place to protect us.
Our final speaker was Dr Aiden Price, a senior research associate at Queensland University of Technology. His talk, Supporting All Australians to Understand Long-term Environmental Hazard Trends and Their Impacts on Human Health, focussed on the accessibility of environmental health data and methods.
Aiden explained that epidemiological research at the intersection of environment and health requires integrating datasets from very different fields. Historical temperature records and cardiovascular disease statistics, for example, are rarely found in the same place, and integrating them often requires novel analytical methods depending on what questions are being asked. Aiden explained that while the volume of environmental and health data has grown rapidly in recent years, much of the information needed to investigate long-term environmental health trends remains difficult to access. Even when datasets are publicly available, they are often not readily exportable, which limits their usefulness.
Extracting usable data from published environmental health research can be equally challenging. Results are typically presented in static reports, while data, methods, and processes are rarely made available. As a result, valuable information remains locked away in silos, requiring significant time and effort to access, if it can be accessed at all.
To address these challenges, Aiden and his colleagues are developing Australia’s first national digital environmental health decision-support platform, the Australian Environmental Health Project (AusEnHealth). Due for release in 2027, AusEnHealth will bring together data across multiple domains relating to environmental health, including extreme climate, air pollution, and water quality, with scope to incorporate infectious disease data. All datasets on the platform will be publicly available and exportable. Researchers who wish to contribute data will be able to provide comprehensive data and metadata, including methods and processes, enabling reuse in research projects nationwide.
Aiden explained that AusEnHealth will also feature interactive visualisations and built-in graphics so that complex datasets can be distilled in meaningful ways. For example, users will be able to use long-term climate data to identify and visualise the number of heat-wave days for specific locations and time-periods, or they can examine impact cycles linking human actions, environmental pressures, and health outcomes. These capabilities will make it easier to identify epidemiological connections and long-term trends.
AusEnHealth will be able to generate forecasts, offering a way to build what-if scenarios that explore mitigation or adaptation measures. This will help decision makers in government understand which actions are likely to be most effective and develop policies to protect community and individual health.
You can access a recording of the full webinar here.
The Ecosystem Observations webinar series is held on the first Wednesday of every second month and is part of TERN’s commitment to keeping researchers, environmental professionals, and data users informed about the latest developments in ecosystem research, data, and conservation technology. Click here to access the webinar archive or sign-up to keep informed about upcoming webinars.
The next Ecosystem Observations webinar will be held on Wednesday, 4 February at 3pm AEST. Topic: Lifelines in the Desert: the critical role of oases in biodiversity and heritage