Health Impact Assessment of Urban Waterway Decisions

Katrina Smith Korfmacher, Katia Aviles, B.J. Cummings, William Daniell, Jared Erdmann and Valerie Garrison
Additional contact information
Katrina Smith Korfmacher: Department of Environmental Medicine, University of Rochester Medical Center, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box EHSC, Rochester, NY 14642, USA
Katia Aviles: Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE del Caño Martín Peña, P.O. Box 41308, San Juan, 00940-1308, Puerto Rico
B.J. Cummings: Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/TAG, 210 South Hudson St, Suite 332, Seattle, WA 98134, USA
William Daniell: Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences University of Washington School of Public Health, Box 357234, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Jared Erdmann: Minneapolis Health Department, 250 South 4th Street, Rm. 510, Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA
Valerie Garrison: University of Rochester Medical Center, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box EHSC, Rochester, NY 14642, USA

IJERPH, 2014, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Health impact assessments (HIA) promote the consideration of health in a wide range of public decisions. Although each HIA is different, common pathways, evidence bases, and strategies for community engagement tend to emerge in certain sectors, such as urban redevelopment, natural resource extraction, or transportation planning. To date, a limited number of HIAs have been conducted on decisions affecting water resources and waterfronts. This review presents four recent HIAs of water-related decisions in the United States and Puerto Rico. Although the four cases are topically and geographically diverse, several common themes emerged from the consideration of health in water-related decisions. Water resource decisions are characterized by multiple competing uses, inter-institutional and inter-jurisdictional complexity, scientific uncertainty, long time scales for environmental change, diverse cultural and historical human values, and tradeoffs between private use and public access. These four case studies reveal challenges and opportunities of examining waterfront decisions through a “health lens”. This review analyzes these cases, common themes, and lessons learned for the future practice of HIA in the waterfront zone and beyond.

Keywords: health impact assessment; urban development; urban health; environment and public health; water quality; recreation; rivers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/1/300/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/1/300/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:12:y:2014:i:1:p:300-321:d:43988

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().