The project addresses environmental health literacy, which involves people’s understanding of how environmental exposures affect health and their behavior in response to these exposures. Environmental health is a multidimensional construct, encompassing issues such as air, water, and food quality, disease control, waste management, exposure to heavy metals, and even climate change. Low literacy levels are harmful, as they may hinder necessary political actions to address global problems. In Amazonian Indigenous communities, exposure to pollutants such as heavy metals, pesticides, and wildfires can be critical, as can the effects of climate change. However, the level of environmental health literacy in these communities remains unknown. In this context, the project aims to develop a scale for environmental health literacy focused on the specific problems and idiosyncrasies of these communities. This will help identify gaps and intervention needs to guide public policies in the field of environmental health. The scale will be developed using psychometric techniques. For the analyses, Machine Learning techniques will be used to identify explanatory factors of environmental health literacy, and structural equation modeling techniques will be applied to measure the relationships between variables.

School of Public Policy and Government (FGV EPPG)
Researchers: Bernardo Oliveira Buta and Benjamin Miranda Tabak

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