The national Cumulative Impacts Project was officially launched in May 2011 by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) and the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN).  “Cumulative impacts” refers to the total harm to human health and the environment that results from combinations of assaults and stressors over time. The Cumulative Impacts Project is dedicated to promoting science, law, and policy that will reduce cumulative impacts.

Cumulative impacts include socioeconomic and psycho-social experiences, nutrition, toxic exposures, gene-environment interactions, infectious disease, and disruptions in climate patterns, among others. These factors seldom add up predictably but are complicated by interactions, synergism, compounding, feedback loops, and other mechanisms that create uncertainty but also suggest crosscutting, preventive solutions.

A new we site launched by the project assembles the latest science, best practices, and analytical and legal tools that can help reduce cumulative environmental harm to the planet, communities, and people. A national working group holds regular conference calls on relevant topics. The project's cross-sectoral approach promotes a national conversation on new research methods that take into account complex relationships among individual, community, and ecological health and highlights the work of communities and agencies implementing these system-based approaches.
 
To view the collection and register for the listserv and working group, please visit the Cumulative Impacts Project website: http://www.cumulativeimpacts.org