California's Health in All Policies Task Force: Linking environmental sustainability with health and equity

The California Health in All Policies Task Force (Task Force) grew out of rising concern with both climate change and childhood obesity, and an understanding that environmental sustainability and public health are inextricably linked. Created by a governor’s executive order in 2010, the Task Force brings together 22 state agencies, departments, and offices to promote health, equity, and environmental sustainability through interagency collaboration.

California’s climate change leadership has presented the Task Force with many opportunities to promote health and equity through planning and decision-making related to the built environment including increasing active transportation and promoting dense urban infill. The Task Force has brought health and equity considerations into processes relating to dissemination of cap and trade proceeds, as well as embedded these goals into grant-making guidelines and scoring criteria for active transportation, affordable housing, community greening, and sustainable land use planning.

While the focus has largely been on the built environment, socioeconomic factors such as poverty, racism, and violence, play a tremendous role not only in shaping health outcomes for California’s population, but also in the state’s ability to achieve its climate change goals. The presenter will discuss how the Task Force has brought health and equity to bear on important land use decision-making processes, the many co-benefits the Task Force has identified of addressing both health and climate change, and some of the challenges that the Task Force – and California – face moving forward.