Completed work
Europe-wide high-resolution exposure maps:
Harmonised maps of the urban exposome now cover many European countries at a spatial resolution down to 25m. These maps integrate air pollutants, noise, temperature, greenness, mobility, food environment indicators and social context. The data are FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) and can be used in health-impact assessment or policy analysis.
Urban Labs: real-life observatories
5 Urban Labs followed citizens for up to 18 months using GPS tracking, time-activity diaries, new air-pollution sensors and mobile phone applications. These unique data reveal how people interact with their environment, how daily behaviour shapes exposure, and how targeted interventions affect health.
Internal Exposome atlas
Over 10 000 blood-samples from 13 European cohorts were analysed with state-of-the-art ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry, harmonised across laboratories in Europe and the USA. This is now one of the largest untargeted metabolomics resources worldwide, identifying thousands of chemical fingerprints and early molecular response markers of environmental stress.
Health-Impacts and Mechanisms:
Analyses across birth, adult and administrative cohorts of 28 million Europeans show that multiple exposures act jointly to harm health:
• Long-term exposure to fine particulate matter increases the risk of metabolic syndrome, hypertension, elevated triglycerides and diabetes.
• Combined exposure to air pollution, built environment and temperature increases the risk of asthma and impairs lung function.
• Urban heat, land-use patterns and air pollution jointly increase all-cause mortality.
The EXPANSE project demonstrated how urban exposures leave chemical marks on DNA and alter gene expression, many years before clinical diseases manifest. We identified metabolic fingerprints predictive of heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
New Metrics and Models for Decision Making
A key innovation is the Exposome Risk Score (ERS), which weights and combines major pollutants and greenness to estimate the cumulative health burden of city living. Based on the urban environmental conditions we measured, the ERS suggests that roughly one-third of cardiovascular disease and over three-quarters of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in older Europeans can be attributed to these modifiable urban exposures.
Complementing the ERS, an agent-based urban health model, piloted with the City of Amsterdam, allows policy makers to test and compare interventions before implementation. Together these tools enable evidence-based design and evaluation of healthier, climate-resilient cities.
