Introduction

Welcome to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Area of Sustainable Development and Environmental Health (SDE), Healthy Environments for Children website. Here you will find documents prepared within the Region specifically concentrating on children environment.

Furthermore, you will find material on children environmental health to download and use in the community and also many links to other valuable websites providing information, documents, and materials.

Our intention is to provide you with the best possible information, useful for the people of the Region of the Americas. We will greatly appreciate receiving your comments and suggestions on how to improve this site. Please send yours observations or questions to:

Why concentrating on children?

Children are more exposed to environmental risks than adults. They can also be exposed to environmental threats more easily than adults. Furthermore, as they are growing, they are exposed to more dangers to their health than adults. Different behavior and evolutionary stages are evidence for children placing objects in their hands and mouth, rolling and crawling in the floor, climbing in dangerous places, discovering new surroundings and new skills.

On the other hand, these characteristics often place children at risk, if they live, play, learn, or work in a polluted or insecure environment.

Poor children are the ones who suffer more. They tend to live in dangerous and more contaminated environments, while they are poorly nourished and oppressed by systems that are not capable of fighting against diseases and infections. Poor children often begin working at an early age in order to raise their living and that of their families.

PAHO is constantly looking for the improvement of healthy environments for children.

Since its foundation, the Pan American Health Organization has been working for the environmental health. We were partners for healthy environments for children and, consequently, were called to share the 1997 Declaration of the Environment Leaders of the Eight on Children's Environmental Health.

Since then, studies, projects, initiatives and a regional program: Healthy Environments have been carried out. We have often worked with Member Countries, obtaining a valuable support from the United States and Canada to have the necessary funds and adequate technical support to develop this initiative in our Organization.

Our effort to improve healthy environments for children is based on many existing programs within the Organization, as the Integrated Management for Childhood Illness, Child and Adolescent Health, Schools Workers for Health Initiative and Health Districts Initiatives.

We are working to encourage this movement at local, national, and regional levels, calling the entire hemisphere to improve the environment where children live, grow, learn, play and work.

We have created the necessary tools to share with Member States, that can also be useful for academic communities, individuals, industry, and nongovernmental organizations, within our Region and throughout the world. They are listed below, offering also links to the documents. The whole material is available for nonprofit public use, and requires consent of the author.

Suggested titles are provided in each document.

• Existing material on healthy environments for children in the Region.
• Profiles of healthy environment countries for children.
• Study on the lead elimination of gasoline in the Americas.
• Tools for education, information and awareness.
• Support for international collaboration in research on healthy environments for children.
• Development of the national action plan based on the profiles of the countries.
• Report on the Regional workshop: Healthy Environments: Healthy Children in 2003.
• 
  Project for a strategy in children environmental health for the Region.

Background

In the 1990 World Summit on Infancy, most of the nations of the world committed to the improvement of children health and the well-being at the international level. To date, leaders recognize that more than five million children die every year by diseases related to poor-quality environments.

The years of disability, the school medical leave and the absence of parents to work in billions of non-productive days every year are some of the examples.

The diseases represent a cost to the society in terms of productivity and human suffering. Throughout the world, families and communities fight to feed sick children and are sad when they die.

• The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasized the importance of nutrition and the well-being of the children, pointing out the dangers of environmental pollution and the need to ensure secure and adequate drinking water and food supplies.
  
• The 1992 Agenda 21, also pointed out the special vulnerability of children to the environmental threats, recalling that children cover a great percentage of the population, that they will inherit the world and that they are “extremely vulnerable to degradation of the environment.
  
• The world community identified the environmental health of children as a primary environmental priority, through the unanimously 1997 Declaration of the Environment Leaders of the Eight on Children's Environmental Health, , signed in Miami, Florida.
  
• The United Nations Declaration of Millennium 2001 urged the nations to join efforts for the improvement of the status of children everywhere.
  
• The NAPHTHA Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) launched a program on the environmental health of children in 2002 and approved the Cooperative CEC Program on Healthy Environments for Children.
  
• The Ministers of Health and Environment of the Americas met in June 2005 and agreed on a declaration, as well as an action plan that strongly supports actions to improve the environments for children.
  
• The United Nations housed a special period of sessions of the General Assembly on Children in May 2002, following the campaign to improve children situation around the world. The United Nations agencies sponsored a meeting on healthy environments for children, emphasizing the importance of the environment as a comprehensive element of the holistic approach to achieve health and well-being of the children.
  
• The World Health Organization launched the Healthy Environments for Children Partnerships in the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2002, convening local and national movements to ensure that children throughout the world be found in adequate health spaces during the day.

Healthy Environments for Children and the Millennium Declaration

Investments on environmental health for children call for the commitments contained in the Millennium Declaration: improving lives of the children, their environment and achieving a sustainable economic growth.

Furthermore, the policies to improve the environmental health of children working to relieve poverty and hunger, improve primary education, promote girl enrollment at primary and secondary schools, reduce mortality of children, and prevent serious diseases such as malaria, Chagas disease, and dengue.

The 2005 Millennium Declaration, named the Investment in Development declares that (AQUÍ FALTA ALGO) of Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the best located (FALTA) in the developing regions, with regard to the ability to meet the targets. Infant mortality is diminishing in children under five and the Region follows the expected line to reach the goal of mortality under five in 2015.

The same report also recommends that priority be given to the improvement of the environmental management and the health systems in the Region, pointing out the need for investing in basic infrastructure in rural areas and improving the peri-urban and the poor neighborhoods throughout the Region.