Environmental health injustice and culturally appropriate opportunities in remote Australia

Abstract

First Nations people in remote Australia hold important historical and local knowledge on how to respond effectively to environmental changes and extreme environmental conditions. However, there has been comparatively little attention paid to the use of First Nations people's environmental knowledge to devise environmental health responses or the effects of various environmental factors on remote residents’ health and well-being. The report explores environmental health injustice among First Nations people living in remote Australia caused by inadequate engagement of remote community members and remote health professionals in environmental health decision-making, a lack of continuous environmental monitoring in remote locations and reliance on health outcome data sets that do not reflect the actual environmental health effects on remote residents. Such environmental health injustice affects people's right to have information on the constituents of the environment they interact with daily and contributes to the lost opportunity to capitalize on local cultural knowledge to create successful environmental health responses for remote residents of Australia.

Keywords

• Air quality monitoring
• Rural and remote
• Indigenous population
• Weather monitoring