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Background: Household air pollution (HAP) is associated with adverse human health impacts. During COVID-19 Lockdown Levels 5 and 4 (the most stringent levels), South Africans remained at home, potentially increasing their exposure to HAP. Objectives: To investigate changes in fuel use behaviours/patterns of use affecting HAP exposure and associated HAP-related respiratory health outcomes during COVID-19 Lockdown Levels 5 and 4. Methods: This was a cross-sectional online and telephonic survey of participants from an existing database. Logistic regression and McNemar’s test were used to analyse household-level data. Results: Among 2 505 participants, while electricity was the main energy source for cooking and heating the month before and during Lockdown Levels 5 and 4, some households used less electricity during Lockdown Levels 5 and 4 or switched to “dirty fuels.” One third of participants reported presence of environmental tobacco smoke in the home, a source of HAP associated with respiratory illnesses. Prevalence of HAP-related respiratory health outcomes were

The wellbeing of disadvantaged children in low-income countries (LIC) is often compromised by a range of environmental risk factors, as well as by limited access to supports and services. The aim of this exploratory study was to understand service provision barriers for children's wellbeing in an urban informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by complementing stakeholder perspectives with a spatial method and a knowledge exchange framework. The research literature and official records informed interviews with 19 stakeholders, who identified interdisciplinary services. Visual geospatial analysis mapped services in relation to child wellbeing. These maps informed a knowledge exchange participatory workshop with 21 stakeholders, who co-produced recommendations related to child-centeredness and safety, community involvement, and accessible resources. Such a participatory approach combining stakeholder perspectives with geospatial analysis can be a useful tool in low-resource contexts.

Summary: Digital technology is having a major impact on many areas of society, and there is equal opportunity for impact on science. This is particularly true in the environmental sciences as we seek to understand the complexities of the natural environment under climate change. This perspective presents the outcomes of a summit in this area, a unique cross-disciplinary gathering bringing together environmental scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, social scientists, and representatives of the creative arts. The key output of this workshop is an agreed vision in the form of a framework and associated roadmap, captured in the Windermere Accord. This accord envisions a new kind of environmental science underpinned by unprecedented amounts of data, with technological advances leading to breakthroughs in taming uncertainty and complexity, and also supporting openness, transparency, and reproducibility in science. The perspective also includes a call to build an international community working in this important area. The Bigger Picture: Digital technology is having a major impact on many areas of society, and there is equal opportunity for impact on science in addressing grand scientific challenges. This is particularly true in the environmental sciences as we seek to understand the complexities of the natural environment under climate change. This perspective reports on the outcomes from a summit in this area, attended by 42 researchers selected as leading experts operating at the interface between digital technology and the environmental sciences. The key output of this workshop was the Windermere Accord, a collective statement around what is required to achieve a transformative effect through digital technology based around four key pillars of investigation, namely using technology to tame uncertainty; growing advocates and champions to enable, empower, and influence; embracing a new open and transparent style of science; and enabling integration and sophisticated treatment of feedbacks in complex environmental systems. These pillars all feed into the decision-making processes and are supported by a growing community. Looking forward, the accord also identified a pathway with particular emphasis on building an international, cross-disciplinary community to address the key challenges and achieve the real opportunities around digital technology and the environment.