The same households, several hazards
Urban environmental health is not one exposure at a time. The household closest to the open drain is often the one in the flood-prone plot, in the poorly ventilated dwelling, beside the busiest road. Our research covers those hazards separately and increasingly together.
Air, indoors and out
Dr Douglas Booker works on real-world air quality monitoring and on environmental justice: who is exposed, who is measured, and whose exposure gets acted on. Dr Marco-Felipe King works on how infection moves through occupied indoor environments, building on HECOIRA, which instrumented real hospital wards for 18 months.
Among our doctoral researchers, Anushi Khandare is studying the relationship between urban green spaces and respiratory health in children, and Xiaoxuan Qin is studying exposure to SARS-CoV-2 on public transport through surface contacts.
Sanitation at city scale
The Shit Flow Diagram and Service Delivery Assessment, developed here with the World Bank by Professor Barbara Evans, changed how cities across the Global South plan sanitation, and now underpin the global Citywide Inclusive Sanitation agenda. Dr Paul Hutchings works across the service chain and the institutions that sustain it, and Claire Grisaffi on the regulation of faecal sludge emptying and transport services.
Newer work tackles greenhouse gas emissions from sanitation, climate resilience, and water insecurity in the UK.
Water and flood in the city
Professor Mark Trigg models flood risk from catchment and infrastructure scale up to continental assessment, combining process-based modelling with remote sensing. Recent applications include rapid city-scale flood modelling and response following flooding in Nairobi, and flood-risk management for displaced communities in Ethiopia.