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Healthy Indoors

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Managing environmental impact indoors

Our indoor environments have perhaps the biggest impact on our health, wellbeing and productivity. Simply because that’s where we spend most of our lives! Home, work, public transportation, cars, public spaces, that’s where you find yourself nearly every moment of the day. Now, take a moment to consider those spaces.

Managing environmental impact indoors

Unless they’re properly tempered via ventilation, humidification and filtration, you are exposing yourself to toxins and surface contaminants from building and furnishing materials, from the ground upon which the building sits, viruses, bacteria and the microbes that other human beings and pets carry.

Even in temperate climates, people spend the majority of their time indoors. So it doesn’t take a great deal of thought to figure out that indoor spaces play an instrumental role in our health, wellbeing and productivity.

Obviously, the problems are not new, but to some degree they change as technology, society and climate change. Research and system design have had these issues in focus for many years.

Currently, we are seeing increasing emphasis on a holistic approach to indoor space design within the context of the built environment, with more focus on the health of occupants and how the many interrelationships between people and both the built and natural environments function or malfunction.

Staying in step with change

Earth’s climate is changing. The big question is, is the built environment capable of providing us with the healthy indoor environments we need?

New standards are necessary, as are new systems, new behavior, redesign, refurbishment, demolition of existing structures. There is much to consider and to do.

Assessing the current situation:

  • Poor indoor environmental quality is diminishing health, learning and productivity

  • Climate change is having negative effects on health and new resistant diseases are emerging and together they may create new problems

  • Strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change must incorporate measures to improve public health

Read the other pages in this section, and understand how indoor environments impact our health, wellbeing and productivity.