The Smithsonian Institution is seeking a Consultant (or Consultants) to help conceptualize "Essential Health Variables" - a minimum set of measurements needed to assess how conservation and restoration efforts affect human and animal health at project-relevant scales.

Context A small but growing body of scientific evidence shows that conservation and restoration can improve human, livestock and wildlife health - enhancing wellbeing and potentially reducing economic and financial risk. Conserved and restored ecosystems regulate water cycles, temperature and people’s exposure to infectious disease reservoirs and vectors. Even in urban areas, green infrastructure can reduce the risks of heat stress and cardiovascular disease, improve air quality, enhance metabolism and immune function, and support emotional and mental health.

But it remains difficult to measure the health benefits (and potential disservices) of real-world projects, because environmental, social, and epidemiological data are collected inconsistently, vary widely in quality and accessibility, and are rarely linked through causal frameworks that support attribution of health outcomes to a set of conservation or restoration actions. This limits the abilities of scientists to attribute health outcomes to conservation and restoration activities, and for health benefits to be incorporated into project design and financing decisions of governments, NGOs and private institutions.

Some metrics already exist to track links between the environment and human health - such as the Global Burden of Disease, and Lancet Countdown’s Climate Change and Health Indicators - but they tend to down-scale poorly. This is especially true for diseases that are sensitive to changes in ecosystem management, where outcomes can vary widely depending on local ecological and social conditions. The key challenge is to identify a minimal set of measurements that capture the key causal processes driving changes in health, in ways that are consistent across ecosystems and sufficient to estimate health outcomes with a suitable level of accuracy for decision-makers and investors.

Faced with similar measurement challenges in linking primary observations of climate, biodiversity, and agriculture to environmental drivers, members of the scientific community have established Essential Biodiversity, Climate, Agricultural, and Ecosystem Service Variables (EBVs, ECVs, EAVs & EESVs). One possible direction for health is the development of “Essential Health Variables” (EHVs): a practical set of baseline measurements (i.e. state variables) that produce actionable information on the state and change of environmentally derived health outcomes at project-relevant scales. In this framing, EHVs would serve as a minimum set of consistent, generalizable measurements that provide the scaffolding needed to help transform fragmented, multi-scale environmental, ecological, and epidemiological data into coherent estimates of conservation and restoration contributions to human and animal health and well-being.

Such a framework could serve the dual purpose of assisting scientists and practitioners to understand how to measure project-level health outcomes and enabling decision-makers to develop composite indicators for tracking and reporting on these outcomes at scale.

The Smithsonian Institution (SI) and partners are requesting proposals for a Consultant (or Consultants) to help conceptualize EHVs and test their feasibility across flagship conservation and restoration programs. This initial phase will build on a conceptual model for how communicable and non-communicable diseases affecting humans and commercially valuable species (including domestic livestock, semi-wild animals and fisheries), and their associated economic impacts, manifest in temperate and tropical grasslands and watersheds. Using illustrative use cases across habitats (e.g., watersheds, grasslands) - specifically including the North American Great Plains (USA), the Maasai Mara–Serengeti grasslands (Kenya–Tanzania), the Baltimore-Chesapeake Bay watershed (USA), the Cañete watershed (Peru), the Panama Canal watershed (Panama), and the Upper Tana–Nairobi watershed (Kenya) - the consultant will help the team to address the following questions:

• What data are required to attribute conservation or restoration actions to human and animal populations at risk of disease in specific landscapes; and how do these interface with decision-making end-points (e.g., policy, project design or financial)?
• Can this information be used to define a minimum set of consistent, generalizable measurements (EHVs) that facilitate interpolation between raw data collected in ecological, sociological and clinical monitoring efforts and epidemiologically or economically relevant aggregations of these data?