Purpose
The purpose of this Request for Qualifications and Quotations (RFQQ) is for the Puget Sound Partnership (Partnership) to commission its effort in reviewing and revising the human wellbeing indicators. The contractor’s efforts will help the Partnership understand how existing human health monitoring efforts, combined with opportunities for new monitoring of human exposures and health outcomes, could address gaps in the Partnership’s indicators of a healthy human population (human health).

Context and Background:
The Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP)’s new strategic plan shows continued investment and commitment to understanding monitoring gaps in our ecosystem, which includes, but not limited to, the following:
• Gaps analysis
• Inventory development
• Data analysis
• Synthesis products
PSEMP and the Puget Sound Partnership: PSEMP is a collaborative network of subject matter experts from many monitoring organizations and different parts of the region. Together, they generate, organize, synthesize, and communicate scientific information across political and organizational boundaries to track ecosystem conditions that directly address management and scientific questions critical to Puget Sound recovery. PSEMP is supported by the Puget Sound Partnership (Partnership). PSEMP has historically been centered around monitoring of species, habitat, and water quality conditions, and not human health or human quality of life.
The Partnership, a Washington State agency that coordinates Puget Sound ecosystem recovery, has a vision of “Vibrant, enduring natural systems and communities.” Parts of Washington State’s goals for Puget Sound recovery include ecosystem support for a healthy human population and quality of life, and healthy water quality. The Partnership has adopted and reports on Vital Sign indicators of human wellbeing, which include consideration of a healthy human population (human health) and quality of life under the definition of “Human Wellbeing.” The Partnership is beginning an effort to review and revise its indicators of human wellbeing.
Guiding Documents: The Partnership and other agencies have developed documents that guide efforts to emphasize the importance of, and action needed to support, human health as an aspect of ecosystem recovery and monitoring. Strategy 26 in the Partnership’s 2022-26 Action Agenda describes actions and opportunities to reduce human exposures to contaminants in Puget Sound’s air, food and water, and to reduce inequitable health outcomes. Strategy E of the Agenda describes key opportunities for the Partnership to sustain and further projects and programs that advance individual behavioral changes to foster community resilience.
The opportunities described in the Action Plan via Strategies 26 and E makes monitoring Puget Sound residents’ human health outcomes from exposures to contaminants essential, particularly in an environment where climate change impacts are being increasingly felt. There is a robust body of evidence that exists linking human contaminant exposures to human health outcomes in general, and the inequitable distribution of exposures and health outcomes across Puget Sound (see the Washington Health Disparities Map, referenced in Strategy 26).
We also recognize that human health spans beyond a contaminant-focused perspective and includes perspectives related to adverse health outcomes from communicable diseases, biotoxins, heat waves, urban heat islands impacts, and other climate change influenced impacts. Human health also considers both physical and mental health impacts.

PSP Website: Puget Sound Partnership - Fiscal Notifications (wa.gov)

WEBS: WEBS (wa.gov)