**: China Environment APP
The reporter learned from the "Introduction to Graduate Education Disciplines and Their Basic Degree Requirements (Trial Version)" recently released on the official website of the Chinese Association of Academic Degrees and Graduate Education that environmental health has officially become one of the three secondary disciplines covered by the first-level discipline environmental science and engineering, and the other two are environmental science and environmental engineering.
The "Introduction to Graduate Education Disciplines and Basic Requirements for Degrees (Trial Version)" released on the official website of the Chinese Association of Academic Degrees and Graduate Education mainly includes the introduction and basic requirements of each first-level discipline in the Catalog of Graduate Education Disciplines (2022), of which the introduction of the first-level discipline includes the discipline overview, discipline connotation, discipline scope (with secondary disciplines), training objectives and related disciplines.
Compared with traditional disciplines, environmental science and engineering has obvious problem-oriented and multidisciplinary characteristics, and the same is true for environmental health disciplines. Traditional environmental science does not involve human health, and it is difficult to support precise control measures with the goal of protecting health. Traditional preventive medicine has insufficient understanding and characterization of environmental problems, and it is difficult to support refined control measures with source control as the main means.
According to the definition of environmental health on the official website, environmental health is a cutting-edge interdisciplinary discipline that extends environmental science to human health and ecological health, through the development of environmental health theories and methods, identify risk factors that endanger human health and ecological health in the real environment, and quantitatively evaluate their population exposure and health impacts. On the one hand, it provides a theoretical basis for protecting human health and promoting the harmonious coexistence of human beings and the environment, and on the other hand, it provides a scientific basis for the construction of environmental management and governance system for ecological and environmental health. The discipline of environmental health mainly includes environmental exposure, environmental epidemiology, environmental and ecotoxicology, etc., which is the disciplinary basis for scientific and technological innovation in the environmental field to "face people's life and health" and "harmonious coexistence between man and nature".
Peking University is the earliest university to carry out the construction of environmental health discipline in China. As early as around 2000, Peking University took the opportunity of merging with the former Beijing Medical University to take the lead in carrying out interdisciplinary research on environmental health in China, and formally established the Environmental Health Research Center in 2007 (affiliated to the Institute of Frontier Interdisciplinary Research, which was built by the School of Environmental Science and Engineering), and then carried out the construction of a systematic environmental health curriculum system and formed a complete talent training program. In 2015, the first second-level discipline of environmental health in China was established under the first-level discipline of environmental science and engineering, recruiting and training master's and doctoral students in the direction of environmental health. In 2021, the School of Environmental Science and Engineering of Peking University established the Department of Environmental Health.
According to the Introduction to Graduate Education Disciplines and Basic Requirements for Their Degrees, the current ecological and environmental problems and research in China show the following new trends in environmental health: from focusing on the environmental effects of pollutants to comprehensively studying the ecological security and population health effects of environmental changes; From simply solving environmental problems to building a low-carbon, green and sustainable development model that essentially changes the way human beings produce production, lifestyle and even survive.