President’s bulletin: prevention, risk, resilience and the everyday work of Environmental Health Practitioners

CIEH recently organised a Parliamentary Reception, marking 150 years since the Public Health Act 1875 and shining a light on how prevention remains critical to public protection today.

The reception was hosted at Portcullis House in Westminster to raise the profile of environmental health and moves towards the establishment of an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Environmental Health. Our message to MPs and Peers was simple and evidence-based: prevention is the most cost-effective form of public protection, and environmental health delivers prevention every day – usually so effectively that nobody notices.

We are living in an age increasingly defined by risk. Not abstract risk, but lived systemic pressures on health, infrastructure, the environment and social stability. Previous generations confronted discrete crises. Ours manages several simultaneously, often before the previous one has finished.

The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report describes converging threats: climate instability, pollution, environmental degradation, natural resource shortages, geopolitical tension, fragile supply systems and widening inequality. These are not distant scenarios debated in international forums. They are risk multipliers that surface locally – in housing conditions, food systems, water security and the environments people depend on daily. Global risk, it turns out, has a postcode and a local authority reference number.

National security thinking is evolving in parallel. Recent forced publication of UK national security assessments recognise that modern security extends well beyond defence. Environmental resilience, public health protection and infrastructure reliability now sit firmly within the definition of national stability. The boundary between civil protection and environmental public health has blurred – and environmental health professionals operate on that boundary every day. Much of that work is preventive and therefore invisible. In our profession, success is often measured by incidents that never occur – a performance metric that is all but unmeasurable.

Closer to my home, Natural Resources Wales’ assessment of the state of the environment confirms that environmental risk is not theoretical. Flooding, air quality pressures, biodiversity loss and climate volatility are already shaping Welsh communities. Environmental change is not a future scenario; it is a present operational challenge for local authorities and the professionals protecting environmental public health on the ground. CIEH has published a Senedd manifesto and I am urging all members in Wales to utilise this resource between now and the election on 7 May.

As Michael Marmot has consistently argued, environmental risk falls hardest on those with the fewest resources to adapt – which is why environmental health remains inseparable from social justice.

Internationally, the Netherlands offers an instructive example. Its recent national household emergency preparedness guidance treats resilience as a shared civic responsibility. Disruption is assumed, preparation is normalised, and citizens understand their role in collective safety. It is a reminder that resilience is not built solely through national strategy. It is built in communities, workplaces and homes – and through the everyday competence of trusted local services. Resilience is less about dramatic gestures and more about thousands of quiet decisions made correctly.

Environmental health has always operated in this space. The profession manages risk before it becomes harm: safe housing, safe food, safe water and healthy environments. It is preventive infrastructure in its purest form. The World Health Organisation estimates that a substantial proportion of global disease burden is environmentally preventable. Yet prevention remains undervalued precisely because it succeeds quietly. When environmental health works, little is noticed. When it fails, everyone becomes an expert in hindsight.

Taken together, these global and national assessments reach the same conclusion: resilience is local, practical and human. It depends on trusted institutions and a workforce capable of translating policy into protection. That workforce is environmental health – in local government, the private sector, the armed forces and the third sector.

The call to action for members is both simple and demanding. We must continue to champion prevention in systems that often reward reaction. We must speak confidently about the value of our work, not as an optional service but as essential infrastructure. We must share knowledge, mentor the next generation, and strengthen the profession’s voice in policy discussions. Quiet professionalism has long been our hallmark. But in a risk-heavy world and diminishing resources, the profession cannot afford to remain invisible to decision-makers – however flattering invisibility may sometimes feel.

Strengthening environmental health capacity is not discretionary spending; it is an investment in stability, fairness and public trust. The work may be local. Its significance is national. And if prevention succeeds, most people will never know it happened – which, professionally speaking, is the highest compliment we can receive.

CIEH will continue to be the voice of environmental health – advocating loudly for work that succeeds quietly.