Making Schools Healthy: Meeting Environment and Health Challenges” Search II Project Results.

The SEARCH initiative, an environment and health research project, was financially and technically supported by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea (IMELS) through the Italian Trust Fund (ITF). It was implemented within the international frameworks of the EU Action Plan on Environment and Health; and the World Health Organization’s Children’s Environment and Health Action Plan for Europe (WHO CEHAPE), Priority Goal 3 on air quality and children’s health. The pan-European SEARCH II project, the second phase of the SEARCH initiative, was developed in order to expand the monitoring of children’s health and air quality, and to assess energy use in selected schools in 10 countries. Four new countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine) joined the six countries that participated in SEARCH I (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Italy, Serbia and Slovakia). The outcome of the second phase was a list of recommendations for improving the school environment, buildings and energy consumption based on an analysis of environmental, energy and health data from the 10 countries. The SEARCH initiative is implemented by the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC) in the framework of the REC’s Health and Environment Topic Area, which is involved in several environmental health projects and works with WHO Europe, the European Environment Agency (EEA), the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and many national environmental health institutes in Europe. The SEARCH II partnership comprised over 50 individual national experts from 10 countries in Europe and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA). From diverse professional backgrounds, these experts work in a range of fields including environment and health and energy efficiency.