Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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For two decades, the UNICEF Report Card series has released a report every two years that reveals the state of children and youth across high-income countries. This year’s Report Card, which will be released globally on May 24, takes a new focus on children’s environment. It compares rich countries’ environmental impacts on young people’s health and broader well-being.

Following the release of the report, on May 25, join the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) for an echo event, where three researchers and users of CANUE data will dive deeper into how Canadian children’s exposures to greenspace, playability and air pollution affect their health and wellbeing.

This webinar will explore how each of these exposures impact children’s health, and what could be done to ensure more children have access to greenspace, playable communities and are exposed to less air pollution.

About the Speakers:

Emily Gemmell is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health. Rooted in a human rights framework, her research focuses on the ways in which urban form influences child health behaviours and how cities can support health and social connection by integrating kids’ perspectives and needs into the design of neighbourhood spaces. She is currently developing a high-level, evidence-based geospatial metric to assess neighbourhood playability across Canadian urban centers and creating a scalable, computer vision model for assessing child and parent perceptions of neighbourhood environments for outdoor play.

Ingrid Jarvis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She holds a BA in Psychology and a BSc in Natural Resources Conservation with Honours. Her CIHR-funded thesis examines how environmental exposures, including green and blue spaces, influence human health and development across the life course among Metro Vancouver residents. Her research focuses on early childhood and adult exposure to surrounding urban environments in relation to a range of health indicators. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach by applying geospatial and epidemiological analyses that combine administrative, survey, and GIS data.

Eric Lavigne is a Senior Epidemiologist with the Water & Air Quality Bureau of Health Canada and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. Eric’s research investigates how children’s health is affected by ambient air pollution and climate change. Much of this work is based on epidemiology, biostatistics, and environmental sciences. The research is designed to be policy-relevant and contribute to well-informed decision-making to better protect human health.