Health and environment are not only a ministerial concern. As the advance interest in the Healthy Planet Forum shows, the health effects of a degraded planet are everyone’s business.

The Healthy Planet Forum has been scheduled in Budapest June 23 to 25 parallel with the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health. Its purpose is to open the discussion to regular people. According to the organisers, the Healthy Planet Forum will complement the more political ministerial agenda of the World Health Organization conference to ensure participation of “all nonpolitical and non-governmental groups.”

The forum will take up the issues of air quality, water and sanitation, inadequate dietary intake, food contamination, mobility and transport, noise, emergencies, radiation and occupational risks. It will have a special focus on children.

According to Laszlo Perneczky of REC Country Office Hungary, registrations came in from more than 30 countries, including some from Africa. But because the event failed to attract the attention of donors, financial difficulties mean that key participants without their own means to get to Budapest will be left out.

Nonetheless, Perneczky hopes that the more than 50 activities lined up for the forum will bring about greater integration of environment and health in terms of governmental policy in Hungary and the rest of Europe.

In addition to the forum’s efforts, the Ministry for the Environment and Territory of Italy will collaborate with the REC in presenting the results of its project Clean Environment, Better Future for Our Children. According to Minister Altero Matteoli (pictured at left), the initiative “is aimed to contribute and realise international partnerships and sustainable initiatives towards the protection of children’s environmental health.”

The Italian project concerns the prevention of respiratory diseases in children and aims at transferring awareness-raising initiatives that have succeeded in Italy to Hungary and other countries participating in the conference. Under the auspices of this project, a National Breathing Day will be organised for the first time in Hungary. The occasion, which has been observed annually in Italy since 1994, takes place on June 24.