From Content Knowledge to Community Change: A Review of Representations of Environmental Health Literacy

Abstract

Environmental health literacy (EHL) is a relatively new framework for conceptualizing how people understand and use information about potentially harmful environmental exposures and their influence on health. As such, information on the characterization and measurement of EHL is limited. This review provides an overview of EHL as presented in peer-reviewed literature and aggregates studies based on whether they represent individual level EHL or community level EHL or both. A range of assessment tools has been used to measure EHL, with many studies relying on pre-/post-assessment; however, a broader suite of assessment tools may be needed to capture community-wide outcomes. This review also suggests that the definition of EHL should explicitly include community change or collective action as an important longer-term outcome and proposes a refinement of previous representations of EHL as a theoretical framework, to include self-efficacy.

Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk

“…Evaluating these trainings using the three dimensions of EHL, as proposed by Gray [8], described in the Introduction and outlined below, was instrumental in defining participant “learning” in the context of an environmental health risk community, as well as identifying opportunities and challenges in future EHL research.…”

“…The natural interdependence of science literacy, health literacy, and environmental literacy have led to the evolution of current environmental health literacy (EHL) frameworks [8,9,10,11,12,13]. The Society for Public Health Education states that EHL “integrates concepts from both environmental literacy and health literacy to develop the wide range of skills and competencies that people need in order to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use environmental health information to make informed choices, reduce health risks, improve quality of life and protect the environment” [14].…”

“…The Society for Public Health Education states that EHL “integrates concepts from both environmental literacy and health literacy to develop the wide range of skills and competencies that people need in order to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use environmental health information to make informed choices, reduce health risks, improve quality of life and protect the environment” [14]. As the mitigation or prevention of community-level environmental health risk often requires coordinated action, scholars have identified the need for EHL to not only include knowledge and efficacy for personal environmental health actions, but also for community level action [8,12,15]. Case studies have demonstrated increasing EHL as an effective strategy to equip environmental health risk community members to develop and implement their own contextually appropriate strategies for addressing environmental health risk [9,12,16,17,18].…”

“…Aligning with Gray’s (2018) proposed refinement to the definition of EHL [8], illustrated in Figure 1, we define EHL here as: (1) environmental science knowledge and awareness related to the community’s specific environmental risks; (2) skills and self-efficacy for learning science, doing science, and environmental action; and, (3) community action for systemic change.…”

Risk Literacy and Environmental Education: Does Exposure to Academic Environmental Education Make a Difference in How Students Perceive Ecological Risks and Evaluate Their Risk Severity?

“…Because only a pre-post research design can provide an unequivocal answer, we suggest that it is reasonable to assume that at least some of the findings can be attributed to the acquisition of tools and skills during the course of studies, as most of them are not common knowledge. Support for this suggestion consists of studies using a pre-post design, showing that exposure to an environmental academic education indeed increases positive environmental attitudes and environmental knowledge, particularly in those areas that require more complex understanding, resource management, policy prioritization, and informed decision-making [6,54,[73][74][75]. The aforementioned changes are, in fact, the skills and tools that enable one to assess environmental risks and the connection between various environmental problems.…”