Abstract
GeoHealth represents the critical intersection between the Earth and
environmental sciences, and agricultural and health sciences. Following
a specific request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this
report provides a series of recommendations aimed at empowering
research, building fundamental workforce capacity, and improving
communication around GeoHealth to the public and policy makers. This
development is critical as a robust GeoHealth research enterprise is
essential to global health, human and ecosystem well-being, and
sustainability. The AGU community along with those from several allied
societies provided the recommendations in this report; these were
developed for a detailed survey and two workshops. The survey and other
input revealed several broad challenges and needs, including highly
siloed funding and support for researchers across institutions and
societies, the inability to access or combine key datasets, and in
particular the lack of clear career trajectories and support. The
recommendations consist of: (i) six programmatic areas where significant
attention to building a GeoHealth research enterprise is needed; (ii)
approaches and concepts for four specific challenges in GeoHealth for
which significant results could be enabled rapidly, within 2-3 years;
(iii) ideas for developing an education/career path and for outreach;
(iv) larger “moonshot” ideas that might yield very significant impacts
over ca. 10 years. All of these have several common elements and themes:
they leverage many directorates within NSF, including all within the GEO
division; can build off of existing initiatives; are best developed
through partnerships with other agencies and communities; and rely on
open and FAIR data sets. Although the focus of these recommendations is
toward and for the NSF, the suggestions are more general and hopefully
will be considered by other funding agencies and other parts of the
research enterprise in the U.S. and internationally.