Despite an increasing demand on Human and Earth sciences for collaboration on occupational and environmental health issues, epistemological and structural challenges still restrain the process. New propositions however emerge, and should allow to efficiently couple the respective expertises and analyses. Benjamin Guinot, atmospheric chemist and physicist at Laboratoire d’Aérologie in Toulouse (CNRS), currently involved in air pollution monitoring in Beijing, will show the common tools to the different scientific fields involved, such as the emission inventories of pollutants (dynamical atlas), the on-site sampling and analyses of those pollutants (physical, chemical, and biological), the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) along with climatic modelling at different scales (global, regional, and local), for different species (including both gases and particles), that allow to visually figure out the impacts of pollution, today but also tomorrow using future’s scenarios. The topic will be illustrated with results over Europe.

The first application for this synergetic approach, involving at start atmospheric scientists, sociologists, biogeographers, public health doctors, and economists, should concern Chinese megalopolis, that encounter huge, complex and rapid environmental and socio-economical challenges. Focus will be primarily made on Beijing-Tianjin, where the CNRS has set for several years now robust collaborations with different Chinese research institutes in both Human and Earth sciences.

Importantly at last, by constraining the possible evolutions of each module presented in the methodology (emissions, chemical transformations of pollutants, dispersion, in addition to the socio-economical interactions), this new interdisciplinary approach should be able to forecast 5, 10 years in advance or more, what could be the environmental and health situation of these urban spots that will gather about 60% of the Chinese population by 2020. It could thus become a unique means for decision makers, researchers and public medias, to get an integrated view of the complex pollution-health relationships.