gms | German Medical Science

Within urban health the exposition of vulnerable populations to multiple burdens is a major topic as it causes health burdens and is environmentally injust. Following the Health in All Policies approach, urban and environmental planning can contribute facing this challenge by changing spatial determinants of health.

In general, sectoral plans address single environmental burdens and population vulnerability is not key to existing approaches. Therefore, we developed the Model on Spatial Urban Health Equity Indicators (SUHEI model) to show situations of environmental distributional injusctice within municipalities. Processing spatial data in GIS is used to identify districts with relatively high and low environmental quality within cities.

In our contribution we present the model and data-processing needed to produce results on distributional environmental injustice using data on noise, heat islands, green and socio-demographic data. We present show-cases from the RUHR and the use of the results in sectoral planning such an climate adaptation and noise action planning.