Environmental Stressors and Population Health in the Context of Sustainable Development: A Small-Panel Study of Eleven European OECD Countries

Climate-related disasters, air pollution, poverty, and population health are typically studied in separate bodies of literature. This study examines whether a fully auditable national annual panel reproduces environmental–health relationships and to what extent this is dependent on the temporal specification and covariate selection. The panel includes 11 European OECD countries for 2010–2022 (143 country-years), OECD poverty rates, World Bank health and age-structure series, GBD 2023/IHME PM2.5 exposure, an IMF/EM-DAT disaster indicator and Eurostat degree days. Familywise corrected, no contemporaneous level association with poverty remains with crude mortality or life expectancy. In first-difference models, a 1 µg/m3 increase in PM2.5 is associated with a 0.165 increase in deaths per 1000 and a 0.152-year decrease in life expectancy, with standardized effects of approximately 0.36 SD. These associations are not robust. Excluding pandemic transitions reduces the mortality coefficient to 0.070. In the full-window weather-adjusted models, the mortality and life-expectancy coefficients are reduced to 0.104 and −0.081, respectively, with cooling degree days accounting for most of the attenuation. The contribution is thus methodological: a national indicator panel can provide an apparently strong PM2.5–health association that is substantially attenuated after accounting for the pandemic period and summer heat. Unequal exposure is not measured directly because social vulnerability is represented only by national relative-income poverty. From a sustainable development perspective, the findings highlight the need for environmental-health monitoring systems that integrate pollution, climate-related hazards, demographic change, weather conditions, and socioeconomic vulnerability rather than treating these dimensions separately.