Uncovering Health Trends along the California-Baja California Border

The California-Baja California border region has unique environmental health challenges stemming from rapid population growth, the movement of people and goods, and industrial activities. Historically, it’s difficult to assess these challenges over time because data are often collected by different agencies, at varying geographic resolutions, and reported with diverse metrics that may not be comparable across time or geographic borders.

Reaching out to new stakeholders working on environmental health in the California-Baja California border region—including contacts in Mexican government and academia—the California Environmental Health Tracking Program, now called Tracking California, collected and analyzed many of these datasets to assess environmental health trends and needs for priority health concerns, identify data gaps and needs in existing environmental health data resources, and provide recommendations to more systematically share environmental health data along the U.S.-Mexico border region.