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ABSTRACTImproved housing has the potential to advance health and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. Research examining housing, health and energy use in low-income countries is limited; understanding these connections is vital to inform interventions for healthy sustainable human settlements. This paper investigates the low-income setting of Delhi, where rapid urbanisation, a varied climate, high pollution levels, and a wide variation in housing quality could result in significant energy use and health risks. Drawing on approaches from health and the built environment and existing data and literature, a characterisation of energy use and health risks for Delhi’s housing stock is completed. Four broad settlement types were used to classify Delhi housing and energy use calculations and health risk assessment were performed for each variant. Energy use is estimated to be nearly two times higher per household among planned housing compared with other settlement types. Health risks, however, are found to be largest within informal slum settlements, with important contributions from heat and particulate matter across all settlements. This paper highlights intervention priorities and outlines the need for extensive further research, particularly through data gathering, to establish evidence to accelerate achieving healthy, sustainable and equitable housing in Delhi.

AbstractThe importance of reducing adventitious infiltration in order to save energy is highlighted by the relevant building standards of many countries. This operational infiltration is often inferred via the measurement of the air leakage rate at a pressure differential of 50 Pascals. Some building codes, such as the UK’s Standard Assessment Procedure, assume a simple relationship between the air leakage rate and mean infiltration rate during the heating season, the so-called leakage-infiltration ratio, which is scaled to account for the physical and environmental properties of a dwelling. The scaling does not take account of the permeability of party walls in conjoined dwellings and so cannot be used to differentiate between the infiltration of unconditioned ambient air that requires heating, and conditioned air from an adjacent dwelling that does not. This article evaluates the leakage infiltration ratio afresh using a theoretical model of adventitious infiltration for a conjoined dwelling. The model is used to predict the mean infiltration rate during the heating season for an apartment and a terraced house located in 14 different UK cities for two extreme assumptions of party wall permeability. The first assumption is that party walls are permeable - this results in a predicted leakage-infiltration ratio that is significantly greater than that used by building codes to evaluate the energy and environmental performance of dwellings. The second assumption is that party walls are impermeable - this results in a predicted leakage-infiltration ratio close to that used by building codes. Knowledge of party wall permeability is not provided by a standard measurement of air leakage but is shown to be vital for making informed decisions on the implementation of energy efficiency measures. These findings have significant energy and health implications and should be of great interest to the policy makers of any country with a large number of conjoined dwellings.

Increased walking and cycling in urban areas and reduced use of private cars could have positive effects on many health outcomes. We estimated the potential effect of increased walking and cycling in urban England and Wales on costs to the National Health Service (NHS) for seven diseases—namely, type 2 diabetes, dementia, cerebrovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, depression, and ischaemic heart disease—that are associated with physical inactivity. Within 20 years, reductions in the prevalences of type 2 diabetes, dementia, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and cancer because of increased physical activity would lead to savings of roughly UK£17 billion (in 2010 prices) for the NHS, after adjustment for an increased risk of road traffic injuries. Further costs would be averted after 20 years. Sensitivity analyses show that results are invariably positive but sensitive to assumptions about time lag between the increase in active travel and changes in health outcomes. Increasing the amount of walking and cycling in urban settings could reduce costs to the NHS, permitting decreased government expenditure on health or releasing resources to fund additional health care.

Transition to diets that are high in saturated fat and sugar has caused a global public health concern, as the pattern of food consumption is a major modifiable risk factor for chronic non-communicable diseases. Although agri-food systems are intimately associated with this transition, agriculture and health sectors are largely disconnected in their priorities, policy, and analysis, with neither side considering the complex inter-relation between agri-trade, patterns of food consumption, health, and development. We show the importance of connection of these perspectives through estimation of the effect of adopting a healthy diet on population health, agricultural production, trade, the economy, and livelihoods, with a computable general equilibrium approach. On the basis of case-studies from the UK and Brazil, we suggest that benefits of a healthy diet policy will vary substantially between different populations, not only because of population dietary intake but also because of agricultural production, trade, and other economic factors.

Agricultural food production and agriculturally-related change in land use substantially contribute to greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Four-fifths of agricultural emissions arise from the livestock sector. Although livestock products are a source of some essential nutrients, they provide large amounts of saturated fat, which is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease. We considered potential strategies for the agricultural sector to meet the target recommended by the UK Committee on Climate Change to reduce UK emissions from the concentrations recorded in 1990 by 80% by 2050, which would require a 50% reduction by 2030. With use of the UK as a case study, we identified that a combination of agricultural technological improvements and a 30% reduction in livestock production would be needed to meet this target; in the absence of good emissions data from Brazil, we assumed for illustrative purposes that the required reductions would be the same for our second case study in São Paulo city. We then used these data to model the potential benefits of reduced consumption of livestock products on the burden of ischaemic heart disease: disease burden would decrease by about 15% in the UK (equivalent to 2850 disability-adjusted life-years [DALYs] per million population in 1 year) and 16% in São Paulo city (equivalent to 2180 DALYs per million population in 1 year). Although likely to yield benefits to health, such a strategy will probably encounter cultural, political, and commercial resistance, and face technical challenges. Coordinated intersectoral action is needed across agricultural, nutritional, public health, and climate change communities worldwide to provide affordable, healthy, low-emission diets for all societies.

An optimisation method was used to determine the optimal heating setpoint trajectory which minimizes energy consumption for greenhouse heating, The method converts the optimal control problem to a non-linear programming problem (NLP) where a recursive quadratic programming method is used for optimisation. A line search procedure for optimisation is implemented to ensure that the step at each iteration is always in the region where the physical problem is defined, It is shown that the use of this optimisation strategy makes energy saving of about 4% on average and that as expected the optimal heating setpoint decreases with wind speed.

Two types of models are often used to describe nonlinear agricultural systems: mechanistic and empirical. For the first type of models, mathematical methods for solving a set of differential and algebraic equations (which characterize the underpinning process relationships) are outlined. For the second type of models, mathematical methods for identification of the nonlinear systems using cross-correlation analysis of input/output responses are also outlined. The study focuses on continuous rather than discrete representation of the systems' dynanlics and on deterministic rather than stochastic description of the systems. The theory is illustrated with two examples of agricultural systems where the above methods have been applied: near-ambient grain drying and winter wheat production.

An intelligent real-time system has been developed to monitor greenhouse sensor signals. Its objective is to resolve errors in the data due to faulty sensor readings. The system (FLASH - Flexible Artificial Intelligence for Signal Handling in real time) uses a novel knowledge-based approach for fault detection and isolation. It comprises three modules: Scheduler, Signal Processing and Reasoning, which communicate via a Blackboard. FLASH has been implemented in C++ on a Sun Workstation running Solaris 2.

Undernutrition is a major contributor to the global burden of disease, and global-level health impact models suggest that climate change-mediated reductions in food quantity and quality will negatively impact undernutrition. These models, however, capture just some of the processes that will shape future nutrition. We aimed to assess how different farm development trajectories might impact on hunger and health-supporting conditions in rural areas under climate change.

Cold temperature extremes can have a detrimental effect on human health, public services and the economy of a country. From a public health services perspective, it is important to quantify the frequency of occurrence of extreme cold events and how this frequency changes over time in order to develop cost-effective anticipatory plans to reduce the potential impact of cold extremes on the exposed vulnerable population. Using non-stationary extreme-value analysis, the geographical and temporal distribution of cold temperature extremes over the last 160 years in several locations in England and Scotland was investigated. The temperature data were obtained from weather stations. It is then shown that the 5, 10, 50 and 100 year return levels of minimum winter temperature have increased throughout the 20th century. It was also shown that the probability of experiencing extreme cold temperatures has become very low in most locations particularly in years with a positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index. Finally, an estimate of the approximate financial risk to the UK economy of consecutive days of extreme cold temperatures is presented.

ObjectiveTo investigate the effect of reducing home ventilation as part of household energy efficiency measures on deaths from radon related lung cancer.DesignModelling study.SettingEngland.InterventionHome energy efficiency interventions, motivated in part by targets for reducing greenhouse gases, which entail reduction in uncontrolled ventilation in keeping with good practice guidance.Main outcome measuresModelled current and future distributions of indoor radon levels for the English housing stock and associated changes in life years due to lung cancer mortality, estimated using life tables.ResultsIncreasing the air tightness of dwellings (without compensatory purpose-provided ventilation) increased mean indoor radon concentrations by an estimated 56.6%, from 21.2 becquerels per cubic metre (Bq/m3) to 33.2 Bq/m3. After the lag in lung cancer onset, this would result in an additional annual burden of 4700 life years lost and (at peak) 278 deaths. The increases in radon levels for the millions of homes that would contribute most of the additional burden are below the threshold at which radon remediation measures are cost effective. Fitting extraction fans and trickle ventilators to restore ventilation will help offset the additional burden but only if the ventilation related energy efficiency gains are lost. Mechanical ventilation systems with heat recovery may lower radon levels and the risk of cancer while maintaining the advantage of energy efficiency for the most airtight dwellings but there is potential for a major adverse impact on health if such systems fail.ConclusionUnless specific remediation is used, reducing the ventilation of dwellings will improve energy efficiency only at the expense of population wide adverse impact on indoor exposure to radon and risk of lung cancer. The implications of this and other consequences of changes to ventilation need to be carefully evaluated to ensure that the desirable health and environmental benefits of home energy efficiency are not compromised by avoidable negative impacts on indoor air quality.

BackgroundTo address the large wintertime health burden in England, the Department of Health introduced a Cold Weather Plan (CWP) in 2011, which provides advice to relevant organisations and the general public on actions that should be taken to protect vulnerable individuals during cold weather. The Department of Health commissioned the Policy Innovation Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to undertake an assessment of the implementation of the CWP over winter 2012–13 and to begin to assess its potential health benefits and costs.

BackgroundThe UK Government has set specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions to lower the risk of dangerous climate change. Previous research has shown that important health co-benefits could result from strategies targeting the domains of transport, built environment, and agriculture. This study assesses the full general equilibrium economy-wide macroeconomic effects of health co-benefits from three similar UK strategies to meet locally specific 2030 greenhouse gas emission targets.

There are a few sampling methods available to survey households in situations where sample frames are either unavailable or are unreliable. The most popular of these methods is the expanded programme of immunization (EPI) sampling method, which has been used in low-income countries. The purpose of this paper is to explain how mathematical programming can be used to optimize EPI and other household survey sampling methods in these situations.