Health Impact Assessment (HIA) refers to a diverse set of analytic and communicative practices that aim to inform and improve social decisions in order to improve the environmental, economic, and social conditions required for optimal population health.

 

About UCBHIG

The UC Berkeley Health Impact Group (UCBHIG) is a non-partisan, independent collective that emerged from a graduate seminar on HIA at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in 2006. The mission of UCBHIG is promote the field of Health Impact Assessment through advocacy, education, research, and community outreach. Faculty from both the School of Public Health and the College of City and Regional Planning participate in UCBHIG.  UCBHIG's work focuses largely on the development of qualitative and quantitative tools for assessing the impacts associated with a variety of planning and policy decisions at the regional, state, and national level.

UCBHIG has benefited from student involvement from the very beginning, inviting students to reach out to the local community by conducting real-world Health Impact Assessments for their class projects. Student analyses have formed the basis for two important early integrated Health Impact Assessments in Oakland, CA: the Oak to Ninth Avenue HIA and the MacArthur BART Transit Village HIA. More recent analyses have included those conducted on climate change mitigation policies, menu labeling policy, and water resource planning.

UCBHIG is one of the participating members of the San Francisco Bay Area HIA Collaborative, who collectively work towards the development of best-practices and methods for HIA, conduct HIAs, and provide training and technical support to individuals and agencies engaging in HIA.

UCBHIG is led by Professors Rajiv Bhatia, Jason Corburn, and Edmund Seto.

Contacts:

Edmund Seto seto@berkeley.edu  Jason Corburn jcorburn@berkeley.edu  Rajiv Bhatia ucbhig@gmail.com