City officials today face the challenge of addressing children’s mental health and cognitive development within urban environments, which are shaped by complex, interrelated factors. These include environmental pollutants (e.g., air and noise pollution), social determinants (e.g., access to green spaces and family income), and internal factors (e.g., stress and nutrition). Despite their significance, these factors are often addressed in silos, limiting the effectiveness of policy interventions. This training tackles this gap by introducing the exposome—a science-based framework, developed as part of the Equal-Life project, for understanding the totality of life exposures and their cumulative impact on children’s well-being.

This training is particularly relevant to city officials and urban policymakers responsible for child-focused initiatives in education, health, environmental planning, and urban design. It aims to address the critical gap of lacking robust, evidence-based frameworks that integrate diverse determinants of child development into cohesive policies. Additionally, it seeks to overcome significant barriers to policy implementation, including competing political agendas, resource constraints, and fragmented governance structures. The relevance of this training lies in its potential to provide practical, evidence-based guidance that can help practitioners across sectors to address the mental health needs of children through science-based approach.

By participating in this training, city officials will:

• Gain a comprehensive understanding of the exposome and its relevance to children’s mental health and cognitive development.
• Acquire practical tools to measure and analyse the interconnection of environmental, social, and internal factors shaping children’s outcomes, through the Equal-Life toolbox.
• Learn to extract actionable policy recommendations from exposome analyses and navigate challenges in translating these into concrete actions.
• Collaboratively develop city-specific roadmaps that integrate scientific insights into actionable urban strategies.