OCCU-GUARD: Integrating Temperature and Air Pollution Forecasts into a Pan-European Multi-Hazard Occupational Health Early Warning System

Ambient temperatures and air pollution are considered as the most important environmental health risk factors causing more than half a million premature deaths every year in Europe alone. However, there is still an insufficient understanding of other short-term health impacts such as occupational health. Moreover, current early warning systems are generally based on temperature or air pollution thresholds only and they do not account for the inequalities in vulnerability of the exposed workforce. OCCU-GUARD will go beyond these limitations by analysing occupational accident risks associated with the joint exposure to ambient temperatures and air pollution in Europe, describing its modification by key socioeconomic factors, and developing a new generation of Pan-European multi-hazard occupational health early warning system accounting for real risks and impacts on the vulnerable workforce. Towards this aim, OCCU-GUARD will generate an enormous database with daily counts of occupational accidents disaggregated by sociodemographic vulnerable groups, together with the best climate, air pollution and macroeconomic datasets. Afterwords, the project will characterize epidemiological models between air pollution and temperature observations and occupational health records; the project will analyse the effect of macroeconomic cycles on these relationships; and the project will use these models to transform temperature and air quality forecasts into occupation health predictions representing the first Pan-European multi-hazard occupational health early warning system. OCCU-GUARD will largely contribute to the EU Strategic Framework on Health and Safety at Work because it will allow the activation of fit-for-purpose alerts and emergency plans directly targeting vulnerable groups, which is relevant information to key end-users such as industries concerned with workforce well-being, outdoor workers, trade unions, healthcare institutions, insurance companies and others.