Section 3 Purpose of EH Resource Guide

Section 3: Purpose of the Environmental Health (EH) Resource Guide:

SPTHB developed this Resource Guide to assist Tribes and Tribal departments to better identify their capacity to recover, respond, and mitigate environmental health hazards that arise from natural disasters and emergency situations. Since Tribal citizens experience unique risks because of their traditional lifestyles and use of natural resources, environmental health programs and emergency management (EM) responses must be tailored to the distinct practices and exposures of each community.

The goal is for the Resource Guide to be used as a tool to enable the user to efficiently look up specific environmental health and emergency management resources covering a wide variety of topics. Tribal programs will have the resources to create or develop their own assessment(s) to identify environmental health hazards present in their communities and to then address the identified health hazards in their own policies, plans, outreach, education materials, and programs based off of resources provided.

The Resource guide has links to many EH and EM topics such as creating emergency management documents (CIO, EOP, and COOP), declaring natural disasters, addressing environmental health issues, improving data collection and reporting, climate change, environmental justice, links for future collaborations/partnerships, and funding opportunities.