The lived experience of people who have been at the forefront of environmental exposures and climate extremes will feature at the upcoming 2026 Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network conference, which will also centre perspectives from Indigenous communities and researchers.
Marie McInerney previews the event below for the Croakey Conference News Service, and also looks to the future for the HEAL Network.
Marie McInerney writes:
Retiree Helen Worth can’t walk past a smoker in the street without coughing, so it’s no surprise the long-term asthma sufferer struggles when a neighbour regularly lights up a wood heater, sending smoke across the neighbourhood.
It’s got to the stage, Worth says, where she can’t open the doors or windows on one side of her home when the heater is burning.
“If you look at my carport roof, which you can see from the top of my stairs, it’s covered in soot,” she told Croakey. “I don’t like the idea that I’m breathing in that black stuff.”
The experiences of people like Worth are critical for informing the work of the Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network, which has put a focus on communities and at-risk groups who are exposed to harmful environments and climate extremes since it was established in 2022.
The upcoming 2026 Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network conference, to be held online from 2-5 November, will include high-profile plenary sessions on the need for a National Air Quality Strategy.
The conference will hear from internationally renowned experts, including Dr Bronwyn King, an Australian oncologist and founder and CEO of Tobacco Free Portfolios, and Queensland University of Technology’s Distinguished Professor Lidia Morawska, who last year received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.
King and Morawska were among nearly 250 academics, industry partners, government representatives, health professionals, and members of the public who issued a warning about the increasing health impacts of air pollution ahead of the 2025 federal election.
In the 2025 open letter, they said Australians are increasingly exposed to bushfire smoke, extended pollen seasons, and more biological hazards from worsening flood events and heavier rain.
These challenges come “at significant cost to our health and wellbeing”, they said, with outdoor air pollution linked to approximately 3,200 premature deaths every year, costing more than $6.2 billion annually.
But government responsibility is currently fragmented across health and environment agencies and across different levels of government, they wrote.
HEAL Network researcher Dr Sharon Campbell, from the Centre for Safe Air, recently reported at Croakey that a National Healthy Air Strategy with comprehensive policies and practices is needed to address “a critical public health gap”.
A report from Europe’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service this week said the 2026 northern summer combined extreme heat, severe wildfires – and thus, smoke – as well as dangerous levels of ground-level ozone, which can damage lung tissue, cause breathing problems, trigger asthma attacks and lead to other health issues.
“As climate change makes extreme events more frequent and intense, it is hard to overstate the importance of understanding links between air pollution and climate,” it warned.
Action needed
The World Health Organization sees wildfire smoke as a health risk that is frequently under-estimated, Adjunct Professor Lesley Russell reported recently in The Health Wrap, while a recent editorial in The Lancet calls for health to be at the centre of wildfire preparedness and climate policy.
For HEAL Network researcher Dr Nigel Goodman, a Senior Research Fellow in Air Quality and Health at the University of Canberra, progress on cleaner air is hampered by “competing interests from different stakeholders, lack of awareness of the problem, and our relatively good air quality, most of the time”.
Goodman, who will chair the air pollution session at #HEAL2026, worked on 2023 research that found the estimated annual number of deaths in the ACT attributable to wood heater PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) pollution “is similar to that attributed to the extreme smoke of the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires”.
The researchers concluded that the number of wood heaters should be reduced by banning new installations and phasing out existing units in urban and suburban areas.
It’s a connection that Worth, 77, who was diagnosed with bronchiectasis as a child, has also made.
She’s struck by the increasing concern about the impact of bushfire smoke on health, when households can “burn the exact same stuff” day in and day out in the cooler months.
After living comfortably in her New South Wales home for nearly 40 years, she has suffered with shortness of breath since a new neighbour moved in with a liking for wood heating.
“I think the main impact is I just get so bloody tired,” she said.
Worth has tried to get support and action from her local council and state MPs, but is wedged in a fragmented and slow policy and legal environment, and a contest between her right to clean air versus others’ rights or wish to heat their homes how they like. “I’m at the end of my tether,” she said.
In a policy brief to be released at the conference, Worth is quoted saying:
“I dread winter. I know that when winter comes, I can’t just open my front door and back door and have the air flow through the house. I can’t open the windows. I can’t sit out on my veranda or spend time in my garden because of the smoke. I’ve spent a lot of money making my house a pod to protect myself, but I shouldn’t have to live with my house shut up because somebody else is burning wood next door. It has changed the way I live in my own home.”
Packed program
HEAL’s annual conferences are a big attraction for climate health researchers and policy makers, not least because they showcase case studies, cutting-edge research, and important discussions – but also because they are free to attend and online, making them accessible to the many communities that are involved in research projects operating in all states and territories.
This year’s event will also be delivered at eight regional hubs across Australia: 2 November for the ACT, Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia, 29 October for Western Australia, 27 October for Victoria, and 20-22 October for Tasmania.
Its 2026 theme, proposed by HEAL’s Indigenous Steering Group is: Time to Listen, Learn and Act for Lasting Impact on Healthy Environments and Lives.
The main plenary sessions will be held online from 3-5 November and will open with a full day’s discussions on the Global South, featuring international speakers lined up in partnership with the World Health Organization from Southeast Asia, the Pacific and elsewhere. Topics will include overheating, wildfires, and the impact of climate change on coastal and island communities.
Croakey is covering the online sessions as well as the Lutruwita and Boorloo meetings. See the preliminary program.
A plenary session on clean energy will be held on 4 November, followed on 5 November with sessions on national health adaptation and another to consider the implications of the current El Niño event, predicted to be the strongest on record, threatening extreme heat, droughts, wildfires and flooding.
Participants will also be hoping for an announcement from Assistant Health Minister Rebecca White on full funding for the National Health and Climate Strategy.
Health leaders have also called for the release of the National Health Adaptation Plan and guidance from the Australian Centre for Disease Control on climate risk assessment and adaptation planning for Australian health system organisations.
Focus on solutions
The HEAL Network launched four years ago with a $10 million, five-year grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) Special Initiative in Human Health and Environmental Change.
While the grant ends in 2027, the Network expects to continue its work, although its next iteration remains a work in progress, says HEAL Network director Professor Sotiris Vardoulakis.
Vardoulakis says the Network’s strength to date has been in bringing together researchers, policy-makers, community leaders, and Indigenous communities into established communities of practice across Australia.
Across many fields and issues, they have sought to identify evidence gaps, and develop projects and solutions “that are applicable at the local scale but have resonance nationally”.
Much of this work involved using citizen science methods, working with communities and understanding the lived experience of people who have been at the forefront of environmental exposures and climate extremes, he told Croakey in a recent interview.
That includes fire fighters and other emergency personnel, as well as people from disadvantaged socio-economic groups, people with chronic illness, and those who don’t have the means to adapt in the home environment to extreme events like overheating or air pollution.
The aim has been to provide solutions for communities who “are sometimes underrepresented in research projects and also in policy action”.
One of his proudest achievements is how the Network has been able to “respectfully bring together perspectives from Indigenous communities, from Indigenous researchers, traditional knowledge and wisdom, with Western science, data, artificial intelligence, epidemiology, and biosecurity work”.
“This is fundamentally doing things differently,” he said.
Vardoulakis, who is Professor of Environmental and Public Health at the University of Canberra, says the diversity makes HEAL stand out from other scientific networks.
Housing matters
Conference co-chair, Dr Mara West, a Yamatji Elder who is Chair of HEAL’s Western Australian Indigenous Steering Committee and who will chair an Indigenous Knowledges plenary session on 4 November, agrees. She says HEAL’s approach is consistently on “communities and people”.
West has been most excited by HEAL’s ‘seasonal yarns’ in and with Aboriginal communities around WA to identify significant climate health issues. Her biggest hope is they begin to address one of the chronic climate health issues facing Aboriginal people and others – poorly designed housing.
The yarns make the time “to sit down and have a yarn with people, out on the ground, to create partnerships, listen to what people are saying, [and] put our voices at the forefront”, she told Croakey.
Her concern is for such research and knowledge translation to continue, so communities who get involved and become passionate and proud about the work don’t have their hopes dashed.
Reflecting on the first phase of HEAL, Vardoulakis said key outcomes include advising the newly created Australian Centre for Disease Control on the National Health and Climate Strategy, as well as steering research and solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of health services.
This has helped to shift dialogue, research and action in Australia from climate risk to actual solutions, he said
He would not be drawn on the Federal Government’s failure to fully fund the National Health and Climate Strategy or on dire predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence, saying he remains optimistic and is focused on evidence versus politics.
But he concedes “we haven’t seen the progress we’re hoping for” with decarbonisation and the shift to clean energy, due to opposition from the fossil fuel sector and concerns in communities that will feel the transition the most.
What the HEAL Network tries to highlight and demonstrate “is that the transition to clean energy is going to have many co-benefits, many positive benefits for health and wellbeing, as well as for the economy, employment, infrastructure,” he said.
“So it’s a change that has to happen in our society, and the sooner it happens, the more the benefits for health, but also for the broader economy and society.”
He agrees that none of this work is helped by the groundswell of populism globally, which is anti-evidence and anti-diversity. Helping to improve trust in science and public health advice, and to address misinformation will be “a crucial stream of work” for HEAL going forward, he said.
Watch the interview
Bookmark this link to follow Croakey Conference News Service coverage of #HEAL2026
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