Regional targets

Regional Targets from the Libreville Declaration:

• Establishing a health-and-environment strategic alliance, as the basis for plans of joint action;
• Developing or updating our national, subregional and regional frameworks in order to address more effectively the issue of environmental impacts on health, through integration of these links in policies, strategies, regulations and national development plans;
• Ensuring integration of agreed objectives in the areas of health and environment in national poverty reduction strategies by implementing priority intersectoral programmes at all levels, aimed at accelerating achievements of the Millennium Development Goals;
• Building national, subregional and regional capacities to better prevent environment-related-health problems, through the establishment or strengthening of health and environment institutions;
• Supporting knowledge acquisition and management in the areas of health and environment, particularly through applied research at local, subregional and regional levels, while ensuring coordination of scientific and technical publications so as to identify knowledge gaps and research priorities and to support education and training at all levels;
• Establishing or strengthening systems for health and environment surveillance to allow measurement of interlinked health and environment impacts and to identify emerging risks, in order to manage them better;
• Effectively implementing national, subregional and regional mechanisms for reinforcing compliance with international conventions and national regulations to protect populations from threats related to the environment, including aacession to and implementation of the Bamako Convention by those countries that have not yet done so;
• Setting up national monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to assess performance in implementing priority programmes and peer review mechanisms to learn from each other's experience;
• Instituting the practice of systematic assessment of health and environment risks, in particular through the development of procedures to assess impacts on health, and to produce national environmental outlook reports;
• Developing partnerships for targeted and specific advocacy on health and environment issues aimed at institutions and communities including the youth parliamentarians, local governments, education ministries, civil society and the private sector;
• Achieving a balance in the allocation of national budgetary resources for intersectoral health-and-environment programmes.