An RF-EMF Planetary Health Impact Assessment Framework is in Place
At ETAIN, we are assessing the impact of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) from both human and planetary perspectives while exploring options for exposure reduction. The project focuses on three key aspects:
Effects on Biodiversity: several lines of research are determining the effects of RF-EMF exposure on biodiversity, particularly on the development and fitness of insects and pollinators. These insects play a crucial role in maintaining local and global ecosystem health, which, in turn, could affect human health.
Human Health Impact: the project is assessing the long-term effects of RF-EMF exposure on human health, with a particular focus on the skin and eyes, as these are the primary biological targets of the project.
Regulatory Recommendations: understanding and characterizing the planetary health impact of 5G, providing recommendations for regulatory frameworks.
One of the main goals of the project is planetary health, an approach that ensures the overall health of the planet is considered and prioritized.
The deployment of 5G may lead to significantly elevated absorption rates for small bodies, like insects. Since insects play a vital role in maintaining ecosystem health, the effects of RF-EMF exposure on animals may also have indirect effects on human health. Therefore, ensuring planetary health is crucial and is one of the main focus of the ongoing research.
In the ETAIN project, experts from the University of Utrecht use radiofrequency electromagnetic fields exposure and its potential broader effects on humans, wildlife and ecosystem as a case-study to build a Planetary Health Impact Assessment framework. This framework will serve as a map of all the potential pathways that can describe our planetary system. Specifically, we are going to map hypotheses regarding:
RF-EMF exposure and its effects on human health
RF-EMF exposure and its ecological consequences. The ecological consequences include the potential effects on insects, wildlife, plants, etc.
The indirect effects of RF-EMF exposure on human health due to the ecological consequences.
Since there is not a gold-standard methodology to build this framework, our experts work on an approach that could potentially be used for similar frameworks in the future.
The project’s research methodology includes two different pipelines resulting in two different frameworks:
Expert Panel Framework: This framework will be constructed through workshops with experts from various fields, such as entomologists, biologists, engineers, epidemiologists, etc. The experts will be asked to formulate the part of the framework which corresponds to their expertise based on their background knowledge.
Automated Tool Framework: This framework will be constructed using knowledge extracted from scientific literature. For this purpose, researchers will use a tool that can be trained to automatically extract knowledge from scientific papers. This tool utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning. The tool can use the extracted knowledge to automatically synthesize a visual framework.
ETAIN will go on comparing these two methods to further develop an approach for constructing future similar frameworks. So far, this process has resulted in a hypotheses-based framework developed from several expert workshops.
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