Children's health and sustainability at the EPA: A commitment to sustainability is also a commitment to children's health

Sustainability can be broadly understood as making decisions in the present without jeopardizing the needs and opportunities of future generations. The most common interpretation of sustainability includes the evaluation of three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. Sustainability has traditionally focused on resource use and has often failed to address children's health. Improving children's health through existing regulatory tools and analysis will allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to achieve many of the goals it has thus far adopted to achieve sustainability. Children are more susceptible to environmental hazards than adults because their vital organs are still developing; they exhibit different behaviors than adults; and they ingest more food, breathe more air, and drink more water per pound of body weight than adults. By protecting children as they progress through each lifestage (i.e. from parental health at the time of conception through fetal and maternal development, infancy, and adolescence), we can ensure healthy children today, thereby improving sustainability in the present and future. This project explores the relationships among children's health and sustainability, recommending best practices to more fully incorporate children's health into efforts to achieve sustainability. Further, it explores the use of children's environmental health indicators as tools to evaluate existing sustainability initiatives at EPA, as these indicators often address all three pillars of sustainability. EPA's experiences in this arena may serve as a reference for other organizations hoping to achieve sustainability, balancing environmental, economic, and social well-being.