Introduction

The DPSEEA framework is a public health approach that shows how broad societal trends (such as climate change and coastal development) can lead to environmental change, shape human exposure, and influence health outcomes. It also highlights where action can be taken, from prevention and environmental management to early warning and public advice. BlueAdapt uses DPSEEA to connect climate, coastal processes, behaviour, governance, and health within one coherent story.

DPSEEA stands for Driving forces → Pressures → State → Exposure → Effect & Actions.

This framework (shown below) provides a simple pathway showing how environmental and societal changes affect health. This helps to identify targeted solutions.

1. Driving forces: Large trends for example climate change, tourism, and land‑use change.
2. Pressures: The stresses these trends create (heatwaves, runoff, wastewater overflows).
3. State: How pressures change environmental conditions, for example, coastal water quality, temperature, or how suitable conditions are for pathogens to persist.
4. Exposure: How people come into contact with hazards through activities and pathways such as swimming, seafood consumption, work, or flooding.
5. Effect: The resulting health impacts, from infections to irritation and wellbeing effects.
6. Actions: Interventions that that enhance benefits and reduce risks at multiple points in the chain (e.g., infrastructure upgrades, monitoring, forecasts and early warning, guidance for the public, and longer-term planning and adaptation).

Within BlueAdapt, Deltares leads the DPSEEA synthesis and adapted their interactive infographic that shows how the framework works in practice for BlueAdapt by visualising the links between water and health. Click here to see the full PDF infographic.

Why DPSEEA matters for BlueAdapt

BlueAdapt brings together many different actions from modelling, behaviour and microbial monitoring, to governance, socio economic analysis and tool development. DPSEEA helps unify this complexity in one framework as we work collaboratively across these adaptation case studies.

Benefits to using the DPSEEA framework:

✅ A shared structure: Positioning each case study on the same pathway to allow comparisons even when methods differ.
✅ Clarity: Enabling us to identify how actions address pressures, environmental state, exposure, and effects across each case study.
✅ One Health alignment: Linking core one health themes including climate, environment, behaviour, governance and health.
✅ Research synthesis: Working beyond identical metrics to compare where and how each case study intervenes in the chain.
✅ A foundation for improved indicators: Informing targeted and meaningful surveys and indicators structured around the framework.

Summary

DPSEEA helps BlueAdapt bring together environmental science, public health, behavioural research and climate adaptation into one coherent pathway. By making cause‑and‑effect relationships clear, and highlighting where action is possible, the framework supports more effective and targeted solutions for protecting coastal health in a changing climate.